A student of mine once asked me “how to paint better branches” and “how to paint trees like Wolf Kahn”, particularly when painting from photos. I’m a fan of Wolf Kahn, who was once a teacher of mine, so I could give her some tips there. But when it comes to painting from photos, I believe it’s a kiss of death if there ever was one.
Why Not to Paint from Photo: The Tyranny of the Idea
In my opinion, you should not work from photos because everything exists in a medium called light. We do not know the thing in itself (as philosophers are wont to say) except through this light. Thus, we never know the color or shape of a thing except as it melts or protrudes from this wonderful medium called light or atmosphere.
Moreover, visual art is not only about the celebration of perceiving the world anew through our eyes, it is also the celebration of our ability to grow by seeing. And as every kid from the third grade on knows, a photograph is a poor substitute for the actual real-life, visual experience. If you want to develop your vision and if you want to grow, paint from nature – at least for a good 20 years. Unless we are just production freaks, the length of time it takes shouldn’t bother us. The payoff is in the joy of doing it – from day one.
Painting What We Expect to See
The biggest curse for the visual artist is that we also happen to use our eyes for reading, and that we live in the Age of Enlightenment doesn't help either. We think, therefore, we are. We suffer from the tyranny of the idea and the perpetual ode to imagination. Because of this, our seeing is thinking driven and we paint what we expect to see. The eye does not rule. Such a pity. The truth is that we are not separate from the objects we paint. Painting is not about observation. It is about sensual engagement and a visual conversation that is moving, changing, developing. And in that conversation lies the delight and the magic – and your growth.
When we observe branches, they are merely objects that do not speak. We do not see nor do we feel the tangle of lines and calligraphy that swim in our wonderful medium, lost and found in a marvelous rhythm that grabs us. Instead, our celebrated empiricist brain, completely modern and disenchanted, thinks branches and the gift of visual lust and tasting is crushed, obliterated. Alas, we are in a botany class. Might as well get out little rulers.
What to Do When You Want to Paint “Branches”
Trapped as you are in this learning environment, I would suggest the following to paint your “branches”:
1. Get a Wolf Kahn book and look at his branches. Fortunately for us lesser beings, he helps us get past the facts of branches, and into that messy, viscous, wet, fluid, thick, murky, dense, jewel-filled, foggy space in which branches exist.
2. Rip off a branch from a bush or pick up a piece of branch from the ground and study the way in which one part emerges from another. Feel how it juts. Can you enjoy that jutting? Branches just repeat that arch, that jump, that boink, endlessly.
3. Squint, squint, squint – if your photograph permits – so that you can see the variety of line in terms of their thickness and weight and speed. Like a group of kids, some just sit there, lost. Others dart about. Some get in your face.
4. Keep in the front of your mind always that what you are doing when you pick up a brush is not making a picture but searching for the thrill. If you get the thrill nothing else matters – as in nothing. Leave the canvas on the easel and move on. It is all about process. Do you know that Franz Schubert would compose music early in the day, whereupon his admiring students would play it back to him in the evening only to hear him ask, “that’s lovely, who composed it?”
5. And from the Broken Record Department, I would do a thousand still lives before I would commit artistic suicide with a photograph. Or paint the feet of someone next to you – unless you are able to enjoy your next dinner engagement from a two dimensional image. No smells, no cacophony of chatter, no banter, no annoyance, no space in which to express or assert. No moments in which to soar and fail, no life.
The problem, of course, is not so much that we went wrong – with the practice of working from photographs, that is. Or that we are not asking the question, “Where did we go wrong?” The problem is that we, as visual artists, are not actively destroying the situation that requires this dead make-believe and, as authentic human beings, not knowing the delight of such sedition.
