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Constructing a painting from your photographs - Kenney Mencher
If you use photographs as the main form of reference material
for your paintings, you are in good company. Just to name a few artists
who are known for this: Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, and more recently
Eric Fischl, Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close. Most recently, John Currin,
who recently had a major retrospective at the Whitney, buys stock photographs
and bases his paintings on them. With the advent of digital technology
the creation, printing and use of reference images has never been easier. More recently, I found that these images didn’t work for many ideas I have for paintings. I felt constrained by preexisting sources and wanted a more comprehensive, copyright free source for my images and so I’ve begun to generate a collection of images that I’ve taken of my friends of myself. Since I use a digital camera I don't need to worry about the cost of shooting off hundreds of photo because I only pint out the ones that I like. Often I get a general idea for a painting. This one started out with the idea of “peeping Toms.” I asked my wife to photograph me peaking around doorways. I coupled my “peeping Tom” image with another idea I had concerning women and cameras and this painting “Camera” was born.
Another idea I had was to build some paintings around the idea of closets. Remembering images from books and film, dealing with clichés such as “skeleton in the closet” and “monster in the closet,” became a bit of an obsession for me. Here I asked my wife to shoot a series of images of me peering into closets. The result was this painting called “Closet.” However, since these paintings are made of multiple images, shot at different times, the construction and combining of these images to make a pleasing and coherent composition is sometimes a bit complicated and whenever we shoot photographs such as these we make sure we shoot them from consistent points of view. Often we'll take several shots from different points of view just to make sure we have it right. You can read the full article at http://www.kenney-mencher.com/article/article.htm
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