Every day we share a single photo from our Flickr Pool shot by one of our faithful and talented readers (that’s you!).
I'll never forget a statement that I heard years ago while studying painting in art school. At the time I was struggling with painting - as someone with fairly decent drawing skills, I was finding the transition to painting a lot harder than I had initially thought. On top of this, I was striving for a sense of photo-realism in my paintings that was far beyond my skill level. The statement that stuck with me was something along the lines of 'if you want your painting to look like a photograph, why not just take a photograph?' So photography became more than just source material for my paintings, and became the end in and of itself.
But I will carry an interest in painting for the rest of my life, and it is not restricted to just realism either. Perhaps, instead of working in a studio from photographs, I had been more like the subjects of Robert Fougere's photograph Sarah Holton and Kylie Ward - Plein air painting. Deep Cove, BC, I might still be painting today.
I'll never know of course, but two things I do know are that a) I would most likely be painting the exact same subject matter that I photograph today, and b) it would probably take me a little longer.
Painters do it in plein air.
Because really, if you want to paint a blue thrush, would you rather observe it in its natural habitat, or pull one out of your freezer?
