about this series

A number of years ago I was having a conversation with a fellow painter and we were discussing the use of photography in my work, which at the time involved a number of strategies, including projecting images onto the painting surface and tracing the contours, burnishing or transferring photocopied images onto the painting surface, painting directly on top of photographs, etc. Somewhat jokingly, I asked, “If painting can mimic the qualities of photography, then why can’t photography mimic the qualities of painting?” Unknown to me at the time, the pursuit to answer that question would eventually lead me to give up the practice of painting entirely and take up photography as the sole means of my creative output.

The works in PHOTOREALISM RETHOUGHT are digital photos that have been manipulated in photo editing software on a computer. The aim of this project is to rethink Photorealism from the side of photography. Instead of paintings masquerading as photographs, these images attempt the reverse. Through a series of adjustments and filters, the results are intended to stylistically resemble as closely as possible Photorealist paintings from the 1970s that were made with watercolor or gouache.

In contrast, the subjects contained within the images of PHOTOREALISM RETHOUGHT are present-day. This can be detected through a close observation of hairstyles, attire, company logos, etc. These pieces eagerly participate in a dialog that surfaces from time to time in varying art practices in which a contemporary subject is placed somewhere in the past. The spectrum of this endeavour usually ranges somewhere between nostalgia and irony. A recent example of this approach to image making is the proliferation of photo apps on smart phones that imitate the look of photography from another era, whereby a digital image is obscured to look like it was printed from developed film produced by an analog camera. For this project, images were selected that had the most “snapshot” look or feel to them to curtail any extravagance in content, because again, the main goal was to create a final product that simulated as faithfully as possible a painting made by a Photorealist from the 1970s.