Painting with Photography
Capturing with a painterly eye pulls from personal memory of visits to art museums, galleries, and art history books. The Impressionists are my favorite period and feel I just want to “eat it with a spoon” looking closely at luscious color and paint on canvas.
On more than one occasion I’ve had some of my photographs mistakenly called oil paintings. The images on this blog post do NOT have art filters on them. It was the initial visualization of the image and the post-processing in Photoshop to enhance that vision that yielded the result. But for this post, I will just talk about “seeing” as a painter.
Formal training in painting teaches you to see in colors and shapes working in opposition (contrast and tension) or unison (blending and softness) with each other. Color moves across the canvas, drawing your eye threw and around the surface and image.
I strongly believe in loading the mental data banks with visual references to find inspiration when you are out shooting. I love the 18th century English landscape paintings of Constable and Turner. Both are noted for studying the effects of light and weather, Constable’s magnificent cloudy skies and Turner’s stormy seas and sunsets at close inspection look like modernist paintings in the purest abstract form.
Photographers pay homage to Ansel Adam’s discipline to revisit and area across the seasons and years to find the ultimate pure perfection in a moment. Monet’s impressionistic capture of light and atmosphere across time is memorialized in his series of painting of the Cathedral at Rouen.
Where do you find your inspiration? How do you discover new ways to visualize? Please share your perspective with your personal post on the website.
Photography inspired by famous paintings
Wedding photography inspired by art history: paintings and film
