"Oh, it looks just like the photograph!"

I grexed about putting this this post up because I know it'll ruffle a few feathers. Let me preface this by saying that is not my intention to hurt anyone's feelings; rather it is my hope that these ideas and questions will spark civil dialogue and cause the reader to think a little differently than before. People can be touchy about art-- as with any deeply held ideology-- and maybe even more so because it can be so personal an endeavor. If you get anything from my posts in this blog, it should be how seriously I consider the field of Art and its potentially powerful social and political impact. 

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Edward Hopper once said (and I paraphrase) that if you could explain a thing in words there was no sense in painting it.  Art speaks to us in its own way that is beyond language. Its meaning is unbounded by the constraints of language, making its opening as wide as the semiotics of human culture. Recently, I posted a comment on one of my favorite art blogs saying that I would take this sentiment a bit farther and say that if one could photograph it, there was also no sense in painting it. I should like the opportunity to clarify this thought.

In an age of mechanical reproduction*, is there art in mimesis? If one's aim is to reproduce what one sees *exactly* as the camera sees it, the question should be why? Why try to re-create reality exactly as the camera sees it? The camera can do such a better job at it and can do it much faster. Its job is to record. There are those folks who take a photograph of a scene/object and then they slavishly copy the photograph onto their canvas or paper. Why this second-hand observation? If everything in the photo is perfect, then why not just let the photograph be the art? Photography, after all, is a time-honored art form all to itself, with all of the elements of art, composition, lighting, selection, cropping, etc., figured out and set up before the shutter clicks.  For dyed-in-the-wool painters, wouldn't it be faster to cut out the photo of the model and collage it onto the canvas and then paint on/ around it? Digital artists of course, have found this an expedient way to work with photo-realistic results in Photoshop. And in an age where time is money, I would think that this cut-and-paste product would be a preferred method.

If you're not now considering a shift to the medium of photography, and paint and graphite are still your preferred media, then I might suggest an entirely different thing.  It might even seem radical.

Artists all the way up to the advent of photography drew exclusively from live models. They had to, as there was no other way to capture reality except to record it by hand. These drawings then became their "reference", used very much in the way that we today use photos as reference. Back then, figure studies were reference prior to creating finished work. Many successful artists today often work from live models to learn to paint and draw the figure and then use photographs for details only to augment their drawing studies to make finished studio pieces. British figurative painter, Jenny Saville, uses photographs to finish a painting, but starts with live models for her compositions and value studies. Saville is careful to "paint out" the effects of the photo; it other words, she doesn't make it look like the photo.** And subsequently, the figures look like they are from Saville's "world".  NC Wyeth's people look unmistakably like Wyeth folks; he too used his imagination and memory for his work. Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girl" is a type endemic to his work. We can point to Julie Heffernan's paintings and see the similarities among her figures, just as we can see Goya's distended people are morphologically related. Other recent artists like Frank Frazetta used live models for studies and practice, but relied on his memory of the figure to create his works, giving the figures and faces his trademark look. Mark Zug's people and creatures are definitely from a particular Zug-universe. 

What is happening here? Without leaning heavily on a photo, the artist has to filter visual information through his/her conscious and subconscious brain and begins to rely on memory and his or her own artistic proclivities. The act of creating art becomes one of presentation rather than representation. The artist, when freed from  exclusively using photo reference as a crutch, is then able to capture nuances, a feel, a look, a fleeting moment. There are fortunate accidents that happen when the brain is creating and not merely copying. That image of a specific girl there, in the photo, replaces any of the uniqueness of one's idea of "girl-ness" and replaces it with a static and too specific a representation. It becomes that specific girl, that model in the photo, and not one's own idea. Better to draw the girl first and *then* find reference to bolster one's ideas about posture, clothing, or an expression.

Here I must emphasize, especially to the illustration student, that it is important to learn the "rules" of reality--of physics, really: perspective, color, and light-- firsthand. Photographs are secondhand sight when copied directly by an artist. Observation is best with live set ups, still lifes, live models, plein air landscape painting, etc. It is time well spent. Learn the rules first before you begin to break them. This applies to the realistic painter as well as the abstractionist painter; both require dedication to firsthand observation in order to develop one's own special filter for creating art.

The artist's universe-- the way he or she sees the world-- becomes apparent to us when the artist's sensibilities and experiences are allowed free rein. Precisely because of cameras and computers, Art in the age of mechanical reproduction can no longer be about how closely one can copy something. Art is a sharing of how the artist sees the world, and how one presents what one sees is a selective act. It then becomes more closely associated to a social / political act. It is personal, indeed, because it is a baring of one's philosophical lens. 

* Walter Benjamin (1968). Hannah Arendt. ed. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Illuminations. London: Fontana. pp. 214–218

**Jenny Saville.  Gagosian Gallery, Rizzoli, 2005.