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When I first began to paint seriously, I did what most amateur artists do:  I copied other people’s paintings and I tried to reproduce photographs.  These are great tools as far as learning the mechanics of painting – what happens when you do this or attempt that (all of which tends to be exactly opposite of what we were attempting, which is how we, or at least I, learn to paint).  It’s considerably less useful when it comes to creating that indefinable something we call “art.”

A spectacular photograph, the one that captures the sunlight just right or so-and-so’s expression so perfectly…well, in my opinion they can be the worst things to work from.  They are already perfect, and I can’t tell you how much paint I’ve wasted over the years trying to reproduce that perfection rather than distilling it into something else. 

So here’s a trick I discovered.  Use crummy photographs instead.

A few years ago, my wife and I took a lovely afternoon cruise on Skaneateles Lake in New York, during which I snapped a photo of a passing sailboat.  Of course, only having an iPhone camera and shooting into the sun between two moving objects, what I got was a slightly blurry shot in which the sailboat took up maybe 4% of the image.  When I cropped it to highlight the sailboat, I got an extremely blurry but better composed monochromatic image, but at least the sailboat was more prominent.  It was the classic crummy photograph; one which would qualify for the delete button except that I decided to paint it. 

Which freed me.  The photograph became reference for things like the size and shape of the boat and sail in comparison to the horizon and that was it.  With respect to the shapes and colors of the water, boat, shoreline, houses, sky (even whether clouds were there) and clothing worn by the skipper, I was on my own.  I could do whatever I wanted.  And what this allowed for was that the integrity of the painting itself became the master, not the misguided notion that because a photograph depicted “this” – whatever “this” is – I had to also. 

I like this painting.  A lot.  I don’t consider among my very best, but it stands for two terrific lessons learned.  One – that it is possible to create visually pleasing paintings from “blah” photographs.  Two -  paintings must have their own truth. 

If you paint and are feeling in a rut, give it a try.  Go through your photos with an eye towards finding a real loser, and then paint it.  You might be astounded at where this leads.