How I Use Photos in My Work

And, how I avoid OVERUSING them!

In previous mailings I discussed the various ways I source material for my paintings and drawings. I paint on site, I paint from quick diagrams, I paint from memory…..and, I also sometimes use photographs. In this piece I’ll cover more closely how I use the photos, and what things I look to avoid in photos.

Whenever I leave the house, 2 sketching aids are always with me. First, a folded up sheet of paper is in my breast pocket, along with a ball point pen. And second, a small Canon Powershot camera, in a really ugly padded case, that is 10 years old, and which I always use on automatic settings. On any particular day, I’ll use either one method or the other to record painting ideas.

I should first give you my thoughts on what the camera can and cannot do. In some ways, the camera mimics how the eye sees and processes the world…that much is obvious. But in some ways it is a completely different way of producing images than how your eye and brain operate.

The camera treats all visual information equally, with no editing, depending on the particular mechanics of the camera and the settings you are using.

But the human eye is constantly directed by the mind or emotions, so the editing process is steady and continuous. We never see all the information in the scene equally, because we are often laser focused onto specifics, depending on interest or need. We see in very different ways depending on our psychological makeup and point of view at any particular time. The world is colored and transformed by us as thinking, feeling beings. The camera does not do that. We are sometimes mystified why a photograph shows little resemblance to our memory of a scene….that could be part of the reason.

So, there is much that the camera misses. There is much about seeing that the camera simply does not even address.

With all of that said, the camera can be a useful tool for mapping and composing, which is what I use it for. I am very selective about what aspects of the photo I use. I look for shapes, colors, edge, values, textures to a degree, and certain aspects of mood that may result from the confluence of elements.

When I am in the landscape, I first have to be moved or affected by a motif I see. Once this happens I stop and visually analyze what is causing the effect. Most often there are about 5 or 6 aspects that come together to create the motif. For example, you’ll see in the painting above how simply the scene has been broken down. I really try to include only the bare minimum, simply because the extras weaken the emotional impact.

More complex areas like the sky in this photo are also simplified so that essence can be kept but one is not bogged down in recording a lot of minutia. There will always be dramatic value shifts between dark, middle, and light, and these will be kept, or heightened if need be to strengthen composition or mood.

The sense of distance, and the relative size of things in the real world, creates the necessity of noting both big and small in a composition. I often use photos to help me locate and record the small information in a scene. Such details are often missed when, for instance, I use my on-site diagramming method on paper, or when I work entirely from memory or invention.

The above points are consistent to my working process for the tiny magnet pieces as well as works on paper such as these which are 11 x 15 inches, and panel pieces which are often 8 x 8 or 8 x 10 inches.

The camera can be used as a sketch tool, and this is especially true since the advent of digital cameras, although even prior to this technology I used to have drawers and boxes full of actual paper photos. Digital photography is certainly much cheaper.

It helps a great deal to be always composing in your mind, even before the camera viewfinder is in front of your face. But even so, I actually use very few of the photos I take….and I take hundreds if not thousands.

As well, sometimes I find interesting surprises, new and unexpected compositions by radically cropping photos after the fact.

You will notice by comparing the photos to the finished paintings, that there is no real attempt to record the photo…the two are radically different. The painting will always have its own requirements for success and all kinds of changes are made simply because the priority is always to solve painting problems.

None of my sourcing methods for paintings take priority over the others…..they are all simply tools to be used at different time to allow paintings to get made.

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As always, my day to day work gets put immediately onto my two sales sites. Canada Post is on strike at the moment, but I have found that ChitChats is a great alternative for mailing packages everywhere and this method is working fine.

Harry Stooshinoff website

Harry Stooshinoff at Paintbox on Etsy

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