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There are lots of different kinds of things to look at, or think about in the world; clothes, architecture, people, textures, nature, materials from the man-made world. Painters a hundred years ago might have gone out and painted in the landscape or hired models to sit for them. Photography and the internet have changed all that.
I get an idea, either as a vision or as something I have seen. Sometimes I photograph it, sometimes I look up the image, or part of the image by typing words into google images. If I can't find an image, I paint it from memory and work out some preliminary sketches. This usually occurs when I've glanced something I can't return to or photograph, or when I can't obtain a photograph of it, like something on the highway on a remote road-trip or an obscure slice of an obscure painting at the Met, that I never find again.
I then try to paint as closely as I can, the original idea. If it's from a photo, I stick slavishly to the photo, almost in a submissive way. If I have to come up with it from memory or a sketch, the process is much more fraught and angst-ridden, with no confidence that what I'm making is actually mine. I think it's because in the process, I'm grasping for straws and may allow another artist's work to grant me permission to do things. I hate that. Working from a photo takes my consciousness out of it. |
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