Why painters deny the use of cameras?

I been talking with a lot of artists (painters) about using cameras as

a help for painting. All of them looked at me as if I were a kind of

evil person.

 

When you go to an art exibition you'll see a lot of portraits,

landscapes or seascapes. How were those pictures done? Seldom we see

painters at work in the strets, neither in the fild (only sometimes).

Obviously they lie as villains. Take for sure if Photography were been

invented circa 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci would it be used... and

never deny it.

 

Canon FT with 85 mm 1.8<div></div>

colours are more like this<div></div>

I believe there is a recently published book by an art historian which presents evidence that some of the old Italian painters did make use of the camera obscura in creating landscapes and cityscapes. However, I think that you are right that there is quite a range of opinion on how appropriate the technique is. Where I live there is a watercolorist who cultivates a photo-realistic style that owes much to his use of the camera. I haven't seen any negative comments on this, possibly because he is very talented, prolific and successful.<br>    It goes the other way too. There are a few famous photographers who have started out as painters. However, in that case the influence on their photographic work is less easily discerned.

David Hockney is the one who has proposed that the camera obscura and camera lucida were used in the Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age. If you look at some of Vermeer's paintings, there is a plane of focus, which you would only expect to see in a painting made with an optical device like the camera obscura.

 

On the other hand, if you look at paintings by the contemporary realist painter Rackstraw Downs, you would swear that he was working from images made by a swing-lens panoramic camera like a Widelux or Noblex, but I've seen him working in the field myself, carting large panoramic canvases around New York City, working across two easels, returning to the same site every day for a period of weeks.

There was an article in Scientific American a couple of months ago that basically refutes this theory. I'm not sure of the exact issue, but I could check, if anyone's interested.

Perhaps the photographic analogue of this question would be the use of Photoshop tools to create painterly effects. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it seems that the end result is what counts and how one gets there is not so important. On the other, a lot of the results depend on the work of the software designer rather than the "artist".<br>    I suppose I might also have mixed feelings about the use of photography as a basis of a painting or drawing. If the painter is using the camera as a kind of note-taking tool, that is one thing, and probably easily defended. On the other hand, if the image is projected onto the working surface, then that seems a little sleazy.

Each time I try to say something on this topic, I find the need to re-examine the issue. I'm thinking now that I have recently seen quite a few examples of works labeled as "mixed-media" in which photos and painting were combined. I also am reminded that Warhol did a lot of work using photographic images in very transparent ways. Perhaps it is all a matter of presentation. In any case, I'm having a hard time trying to connect this discussion meaningfully to classic cameras. I think I'll just shut up.

I'm the chair of the local arts council in my chunk of part of central Ontario in Canada. Most of the artist I know and those I talk to at gallery showings work from photographs. It seems that hardly any of them do much painting in the field. One man specializes in taking an old photograph and working from that base, draws extraordinary photo realistic portraits. Often the photos he has to work from are fairly lame 4x6 prints.

 

I am attaching the drawing that I made from a photograph under his tutelage (about 30 hours of work).<div></div>

final photo realistic pencil drawing<div></div>

Beautiful beautiful work.

Luis and Gibson, beautiful work. As I recall, the German painter Albrecht Duerer always drafted his paintings with a camera obscura.

Around the (before last) turn of the century there was a famous german painter, Franz von Lenbach. He was the most fashionable portraitist of his era and made a fortune, you can still visit his house (or rather palace) in Munich. Many of his portraits were painted after photographs, I do not know whether he took them himself. Also some french painters of the late 19th century sometimes used photos as templates.

 

In the 70s or so there was a painting style called "photo realism". Those painters made oversized portraits at least as precise as a photograph, but I do not know whether they used photos as templates.

As a Art professor of mine was fond of saying, "If you want something to look like a photograph, take a photo. If you want a personal interpretation of what you are looking at, draw it or paint it." That being said, I have used photo's in the painting process. I do feel, however, that when using a photo as a guide to develop a painting or drawing, there is a slight perspective shift that you would not see if you were looking at the actual subject.

As i said: "seldom". I know in the 60s, artists as Hockney ("Mr. and Mrs. Clark with Percy"), Lichtenstein, Hamilton, J. Johns and so on did use of cameras. Dutch masters as Veermer, for instance, used a "camera oscura" like in his picture "The Guitarist" . Today not much people confess they use a camera, Maybe becouse unwittingly they know abut their luck and limitations for drawing well. Obviously good drawers don't need it to make a good portrait. Maybe that is the reason I use a camera to arrive to make an oil portrait.

 

WJ, that one is grate. Sure Mr. Huston would like to have seen such a nice portrait. Carry on with both arts. If it's heavy raining outside and don't want to get your camera wet, and have no roll to develop: Draw!

 

Regards

Gordon: that is the idea. Your professor was right. But today most of realistic artists use the camera ONLY AS A HELP to arrive to the final work.

 

Mike, if the camera oscura was created in the 16th century to help painting, I think this is a matter to do with antique cameras before 1970. Don't get anger :-)

Actually, recent studies show that the camera obscura may date back as far as 8th century China. If one looks at the progress in painting, from very early to modern, you will see how things like perspective, scale, composition and such have changed gradually over the centuries as knowledge grew. A good part of this was due to the use of the camera obscura. Then along came photography. In the 19th century, photographs were not allowed to be displayed in art galleries at the outset. In fact, the whole photo / painting thing almost turned into a small war. It's still an issue among the "purists".

thanks for the comments, the man who taught me is the best art teacher I have ever encountered....everyone who took that course produced tremendous results. I had never had any real art training. I had tried to draw some grand parents and reat grand parents from old photos with little luck.

<p>

my teacher was Mark Tumber - <a href="http://www.marktumber.com/">www.marktumber.com - see his work there</a>

I think it should be fairly simple to create software that will take a photo, "posterize" if necessary, to get fewer shades of color, then generate a paint-by-numbers picture. I wonder how many artists would go for that?

Luis and WJ, very nice! Thanks for sharing.

 

Glenn Thoreson is absolutely right about painters and cameras.

Many of them beat the sizes of any process camera!

What a mean look you gave that young boy! The lines radiating down from the corners of his mouth are way too dark - compare them to the photo.

Alot of painters take a snapshot; and have us enlarge it to the size they want for the painting. Usually we just do a cheap giant xerox in greyscale as a light copy. They do this to get the perspective better; facial features better; layout better. Many act abit weird; like a teenager buying safeties in a small town drug store. They dont want tthe general public to know of these "painting aids" at all. Also students do this to get drwing assignments done quicker. Some folks have a fantastic eye for color and features; but way less sense of scale and perspective. In the middle ages they used drawing aids in painting too. This is a commonplace thing.

Thanks Vivek.

 

David, you right, but in the original painting those lines aren't dark at all. I scanned the painting picture (I haven't the original oil painting) just as an exemple conected with the question I exposed.

 

Thanks for your responses and apreciations.<div></div>

Long before photography was practical, sketchers and painters used a device called "Camera Lucida" which was a set of prisms and lenses that clamped to the drawing board and projected the scene to the eye as if it were to the drawing surface. Then the artist merely sketched in what appeared to be a projected imnage. They were manufactured well into the mid twentieth century and sold by such firms as K&E, Posts, Dietzgen, and others catering to draftsmen and artists. They bring a good figure on the scientific instrument auctions today and I suppose many artists who eschew the use of photographs are still using them.<p> When I was in architecture school and had a darkroom the architectural history courses often required sketches of notable buildings. Students would bring me negatives they had made and I would print them thinly on Dasonville "Charcoal Black" art papers. The student would then draw his picture thereon and bring it back to me for bleaching out the silver. The instructors at first cast a jaundiced eye on the practice and then reconsidered and incouraged it since they became convinced that they wee encouraging two "arts" at the same time. On the other hand, the freehand drawing instructors were much less enthusiastic and sometimes downright negative.

Norman Rockwell was a large user of photos for his paintings. In fact, the self-protrait of the artist at his easel shows several photos tacked or taped to the corner of the painting. He recomended photos largely for accuracy of detail rather than for composition.

It's perhaps stretching this topic a little, but bread-and-butter portrait and landscape artists in the mid-19th century were reduced to penury once the Daguerrotype process became commercial. Just to show that nature doesn't like imbalances, the then starving impressionist painters suddenly found themselves in favour - and therefore rich - because their creations featured something no camera could produce, ie intentional artistic distortion. I'm sure that Messrs Monet, Renoir & Co would have regularly visited the grave of M. Daguerre and thanked him for their new-found wealth .... PN