Painting from Photos

It would be fair to say that I have a love / hate relationship with photographs, which is a purely personal dilemma. On one hand I find my work to be very lacking when I don’t have a good reference image, to use as a touch stone to building the larger picture. At the same time, I dislike being tied to the reference image and feel that more and more my work is moving away from say, photographs form magazines or the internet or wherever I used to source most of my references from.

Other artist, feel that photographs are a tool to be used and argue that greats of yesteryear, such as Van Gogh and earlier artists would have no qualms of the use of photographs. This argument is purely academic as we will never know for sure; the only thing that is important now is you, the individual artist, and your relationship to using photographs in your work.

The ideal being that we learn to use them correctly. Not to become to dependent where our painting becomes a slave to the reference and lacks that personal burst of imaginative energy that provides the life in the work, and at the same time being open to their obvious uses and advantages as we learn to move further and further into our own unique style.