Back and Forth

This week, as i was preparing to teach a class about painting people, I had a revelation. I always tell my students to look at the shadows and shapes not the features and I also tell them how difficult it it so paint someone you love…. because you are so invested, and it is hard to keep the objectivity about them. But this time, I became aware of something else. How to capture shapes and how to capture a person’s spirit in paint.

When drawing or painting from life — or even a still-life— one is faced with the task of taking something that is three dimensional and translating it to a flat image. When working from a photo, one has an image that is already flat. Too often, (especially for people who trace a photo onto their watercolor paper) the image remains flat. The trick is to SEE the three dimensional nature of the original image and recreate that three dimensionality in your drawing…. to see the perspective and geometry and the planes again… as if you would if you were looking at the actual subject and not a photo The drawing is a translation. If you see it as that… you learn the language of drawing and you get a more accurate translation. It is the difference between translating something when you know the language, and running something through “google translate” which often results in fractured English. (A plug for practicing drawing from life if you want to become a better painter and why it is always best to paint from photos that you have taken yourself.)

Then, there is the other matter of painting a person from a photo. I realized as I was preparing my drawing for the painting demo of my grandson, that I was recreating a photo which I took of him when he was looking at me…I was bringing myself back to the moment where I connected with him and photographed him over a dish of ice cream. The goal of the painting was to catch the shapes, the shadows and the perspective of the photo, but also to recreate the moment of the photo….. and it doing so I could recreate it’s essence. Painting that image, and was truely a spiritual experience of bringing me back to a moment in time where I could actually reexperience it. Perhaps that’s where the magic happen.

For the first time, I understood why some cultures believe that to take someone’s photo might actually steal the subjects “soul.” …and how painting from a photo which is a moment of connection can recreate that wonderful feeling of connection.