Painting and Photography: Modern Allies - Ben Morales-Correa

Since the invention of photography, the way we perceive reality and express it through the visual arts has changed considerably. Photography has influenced many artists. I'm a great admirer of the work of Edward Hopper. He's one of the first artists that captured the images of every day life and recreated them as if taken by an unpretentious photographer. Hidden in its simplicity of form and design is a sense of the anecdote, the story from which the image is but a snapshot.

As a painter, I use photography to help me visualize composition, color, light and shade values. Today's computer technology offers an unprecedented freedom in creative photo manipulation. On this website I present a sample of photographic images that, in my opinion, has successfuly met my standard of what a truly digital photo-art painting should look like, in the realist style of Hopper, if only in the technical aspects of form simplication, purity of color and pleasing contrasts. I have tested this process in hundreds of photos of diverse subject matter to see how it performs, and how it can help even the most unpretentious snapshot achieve pleasing aesthetic results.

There are as many ways to paint as there are painters. As a photo-artist, my approach to convert a photo into a realist style painting is to:

1. create a color scheme where all the elements of the picture relate to each other in a unified consistent manner
2. simplify shapes in terms of color values
3. enhance the contours to bring the structure together
4. use just enough detail to render an image convincingly

I tend to work on the entire image as a whole. That way I get to maintain the integrity of my photos. It is the simplicity of form, the purer colors and the beauty of contrast that create a painting out of a photo.