I Am The Camera

I’ll come out and admit it straight away - my paintings are usually copies of photos. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise as they have that ‘photographic’ feel about them. Sometimes I feel somewhat guilty about this. It’s something that stopped me dead in my tracks in earlier years - ‘you’re no artist because all you can do is copy photos’. But I’ve come to the conclusion, quite late in life, that I want to paint, and I’ll do whatever it takes to paint, and if that means copying photos, so be it.

I want to celebrate the beauty of things as they are. If I’m painting a building, I want to celebrate the architecture. If I’m painting a machine, I want to celebrate the engineering ingenuity of the people who designed and built it. If I’m painting a person, I want to celebrate their eyes and nose and mouth and hair and skin. I want to celebrate what makes them who they are. At this point in my artistic journey, broad brush strokes just won’t do.

People may say, so why don’t you take a photo then? I love photography, and it’s just as much of an art form as any other. But if I really love something, I want to do more then just photograph it. I want to channel its beauty through me. It may come out looking something like a photo, but it has gone through me, been reprocessed by me. And I find the process of rendering it accurately very satisfying and fulfilling. I am the conduit. I am the camera.

If other people like the results, that is amazing, and I will be so grateful, just so long as I can paint. What I hope to do is view every painting as practise, and if I practise enough, there may come a day when I can paint what’s in my head, rather than just what’s in a photo. I don’t think I’ll ever escape the need to use references (as a lot of artists do), but I hope I’ll be able to use them more selectively, and in the process develop more of a style of my own. That’s the hope - come back here in a few year’s time and I’ll let you know how I’ve been getting on!

Some people might say copying from a photo is not art. Painting exactly what you see is not art. Interpreting what you see is art. There is truth in this, I think. But sometimes I think you have to learn the rules to break them. Not that I’m any great rule breaker, but I suppose believing there are rules that I must abide by has put me off painting for years and years. But thankfully, I’m now in a position where I care a lot less. I am following the rules I have set myself at the moment, but I hope that as I grow more confident with them, I’ll feel more confident about breaking them. I’ll relax and won’t worry so much about painting outside the lines, or getting that likeness just right. I’ll be able to let go, at last. I’m not sure I’ll ever stray that far from realism, but I hope I’ll find the courage to develop a style of my own, and interpret images more loosely. Maybe then I’ll be able to render the things in my head, and that could be interesting.