I think William has missed the point. MAndo and I were discussing painting from reality as done by using photographs. Since William doesn't paint reality he seems to have construed what we wrote to his own ends,which is unfortunate. MAking a painting deliberately of a photograph as an examination of the photograph is not what was under consideration, nor was using "the photo as a quick aid to organizing nature". It is not my position that flatness or stupid color are necessarily the result of using photographs,but rather I think they are the result of the stupid use of photographs. While I agree with William that photographic images have a gret influence on how we parse scenes, I think as well that the images made before the advent of photography have a great deal of influence on how photographers determine scenes in the present. Kate Sullivan
In a message dated 12/7/08 9:34:54 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > There are a lot of assumptions in these remarks by Kate and Mando. > None of them are anything other than value judgments, and very narrow ones at > that. Again, there are some paintings made from photographs in which the > subject to be investigated and painted is the photograph. The aim is to make a > painting that examines the information in the photograph. In these cases, > the aim is not to use the photo as a quick aid to organizing nature. The photo > is not a template, but the subject itself. > > Flatness and "stupid color" (and what is stupid color?) are not necessarily > the result of using photograps in painting. Some other artists use the photo > as an aid to painting the look of nature. As one who never uses a photograph > in any part of my work, I don't care much whatever choices others make about > using photos. In my opinion, anything at all may be used to make art > because it's not the means but the ends that matter. Also, I think it's an obvious > fact that nature has always been mediated by some schema and these influence > our perceptions. We should keep in mind that we always "construct" our sense > impressions and we construct them according to both learned and intuited > gestalt patterns. So even when today's artists don't use photographs in making > their paintings, they are perceiving nature as if it were a photograph. We > can't go back to pre-photographic mental constructs of perception. > ************** Make your life easier with all your friends, email, and favorite sites in one place. Try it now. (http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp& icid=aolcom40vanity&ncid=emlcntaolcom00000010)
