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Totally agree. There's a raft of modern realist painters who's work is so similar to photographs that they're utterly devoid of the main criteria of good art...

Totally agree. There's a raft of modern realist painters who's work is so similar to photographs that they're utterly devoid of the main criteria of good art... feeling A lot of this is compounded by the practice of working from high def photographs. Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos. As an illustration of this, try and take a photograph of a beautiful sunset and compare it to what you see

cntainer 5y ago
I always found that practice weird. When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas. Yes there are many photos that you can call art, but if you're not the one that took the original photo it feels like most of the creative effort was not yours and you're just showing off your brush/pen technique. As a disclaimer, I have 0 talent when it comes to drawing/painting so I'm pretty much clueless about the creative process of modern painting.
- dagw 5y ago
  When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas. There are lots of ways of using a photo as a source. A lot of the 'art' comes from choosing which techniques and paints and colors to use to capture the feeling you are after. You can also choose to make choices like adding/removing elements, changing the field of view or moving the point of view, playing with perspective etc. to make the composition more interesting. You can give the same photo to 100 different artists and you will get back 100 different paintings with 100 different artistic choices, some of which will appeal to you on an artistic level a lot more than others.
  - cntainer 5y ago
    Thank you for the details, and I agree that what you describe includes plenty of creative effort. I guess my scenario was much more narrow, as I was thinking about doing an exact copy of a photo that you didn't take yourself. Doing an exact copy limits greatly the number of artistic choices you could make as most of the choices were made by the photographer. Just found out this is actually a thing called photorealism where the artist is expected to also take the original photo. Feels good to read about something else than software and politics for a change :).
- watwut 5y ago
  Is it weirder then trying to become good in literally any other craft or skill? People spend hours trying to become good at coding competitions, games, sport, musical instrument, embroidery, hoby electronics ... you name it. Why would "trying to become as good as possible at creating realistic drawing" would be weirder then anything else? The technical skill involved in making it look hyper realistic is huge.
  - cntainer 5y ago
    By "weird" I meant that having great technique doesn't automatically translate to great art. It could translate to greater craftsmanship, faster and more precise work, but by art I understand the process of applying your own creative filter and emotions to whatever you want to represent/imitate in whatever medium. I feel like I'm going to deep into this "art" thing so time to get back to a domain where I have more experience, software development. Being great at touch typing is an awesome skill that many people train but typing fast doesn't make you automatically a great developer/architect/manager. I see the effort of exactly copying someone else's photo similar to how developers do "coding katas" to hone their fundamentals. It's basically practice, not really creative problem solving. Nothing wrong with honing one skills, but in my book skills are tools to be used as part of a creative process. They don't replace the creative process, but they can elevate the end result.
    - watwut 5y ago
      Artists themselves do call it art tho. They value the technical skill on itself too, apparently. And talk about it a lot. And then it becomes separate field where you can try to excel or competition on itself. (Also, in subgenres like manga when they talk about quality of art, they typically mean technical skill more then ability to convey emotions.) It makes it something you don't value or like, which is 100% valid. But it seems to be fairly within what artists themselves call art.
      - cntainer 5y ago
        I understand that people can call art whatever they like. One can argue that doing an exact copy of a photograph with the end result being indistinguishable from the original photo is some kind of "meta" art and the lack of creativity actually puts focus on the technical skill and the effort of the artist, as a kind of "anti-creativity statement" type of art, "there is no artist just paint and effort". But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality. Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort? On that note, I think I'll stop. I feel I'm getting high just from all the meta-ideas I'm writing, lol.
- yanmaani 5y ago
  What's wrong with brush/pen technique?
  - cntainer 5y ago
    Nothing, it's a great skill to have, and one that I never invested in.
- rdtsc 5y ago
  The painter themselves can take the photo. Photos can help if the subject or the scene is hard to be around long enough to paint. Say, an artist painting impressionistic city streets in the rain. It’s hard to stay in the rain and paint, but they can take a photo and paint at home, while recalling the feeling of being at the scene - the cold, the wetness, the sound of the splashing water, cars driving by, etc.
  - cntainer 5y ago
    yep, I already addressed this in another comment, that's photorealism, and the artist always takes the picture so painting it is just the last step in the overall creative process. my point was that it feels weird for me to call it art if you didn't take the photo and your just doing the last, arguably less creative, step. Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser".
    - rdtsc 5y ago
      > Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser". Yeah, it does in a certain way. Say, I take a picture then send it so someone to make a "painting" of it. I does feel a bit "lesser". Of course, depending on the trend in art, it may be that's the whole point of the piece -- to highlight that everything is just a copy of a copy and so on. Basically, it could be a deliberate part of the process like say https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbells-soup-cans-1962/ https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbel...
jacobolus 5y ago
> Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos What if you use a camera obscura, as many of the “old masters” are believed to have done?
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  Funnily enough quite a lot of artists use early digital cameras, where the quality is described as 'grainy' Its of just bad enough quality (and hasn't been altered by algorithms) that you can get a 'sense' of the scene without too much detail, being over/under-exposed, etc. Edit: also see the use of a 'black mirror' https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror/ https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror...
- rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
  I think this is a perfect post to bring up the theory of Vermeer's work presented in this film, "Tim's Vermeer." The focus of the movie, Tim Jenison of NewTek, hypothesized the use of a mirror to allow an almost paint-by-numbers recreation of the sitting subject. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
inasmuch 5y ago
I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. In some part due to the difference in skill development required by using a photo for reference versus using live references or your imagination/memory/whatever, but mostly because of how much the technological conceits and limitations of that photography come to infect other media which don't suffer from them. It's most obvious in paintings and videogames. Depth of field, bokeh, motion blur, perspective, lens distortion—even focal length and composition. Once you realize it, it becomes impossible to ignore, and it really compromises the work for me. So many of the most technically adept artists today are using all their skill to effectively simulate one form of art with another. It's an interesting exercise, sure, and I'll never dissuade someone from developing and refining a skill, but in the best-case scenario, I'm just left thinking I'd rather see the photo or the movie, or not see the image at all. And I'm someone who will gladly spend 20min+ standing in front of a Rembrandt. I don't have any issue with realism in art and think it can be quite effective when used well. But so much of what makes something like The Night Watch incredible is how it feels both convincingly real and compellingly uncanny at the same time due to its rendering from some fuzzy approximation of what the artist observed from his models, conceived in his mind's eye, and meticulously sketched and reworked. To me, it's the ability to capture and create something within/from that gray area that makes an artist great.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  Yes, people confuse an accurate photograph of being as real as you can get. But in actuality the brain does a lot of work in order to compose a scene, as any optical illusion will reveal. So the accuracy of a photo becomes its downfall in feeling real. The Impressionists understood this and used effects such as 'optical mixing' (from the scientific findings of Maxwell) to create works that felt more real
- technothrasher 5y ago
  > I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph. For instance, Ben Aronson (https://benaronson.net/ https://benaronson.net/), a contemporary impressionist painter I very much like, heavily uses photographic references to paint cityscapes that he just literally couldn't paint live (because, say, its in the middle of a busy downtown street, or way up in the air between buildings). But his paintings are far from "photorealistic", not only utilizing an impressionist style, but also often moving or adding buildings or landscape that don't actually exist in the photo.
meowzero 5y ago
I met a local portraiture teacher, and all he did was take a nice photo of someone and copy it on canvas. His craft seemed great. But I didn't get the point of copying a photo exactly. Why not just print out the photo? But I guess he enjoyed the painting process.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  Yes it'll never turn out as good because you're no longer painting a face; you're painting a poorer 2D representation of a face
  - meowzero 5y ago
    his painting looked exactly like the photo. So it's like a painted version of the photo. It was very realistic. And like I mentioned, the craft of painting was great. But he took the time to take a nice portrait with a camera so he can paint it. Since I'm a photographer, I guess I didn't get why he would need to copy a photo exactly.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    What if a 3D scan were taken of the subject, and the artist then made the painting while viewing the 3D representation in some kind of augmented reality setup? That would be 3D but still effectively painting from a "photo".
    - jack_riminton 5y ago
      But then you're adding in several more processing layers away from reality: 1) the digital scan won't pick up the details sufficiently 2) the AR rendering will again strip a lot of detail It'd also be incredibly difficult and straining for your eyes of focussing on a canvas and then on an AR image
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "Why not just print out the photo?" An interesting argument... which could be extended to "why paint from life?" because you're just copying what you see. In fact, some artists who paint completely from their imagination or who create nonrepresentational art have this exact objection to just painting what you see (even without photographic reference), which they don't find interesting because it's not creative enough for them.
pmoriarty 5y ago
Vermeer is highly regarded, yet there is evidence that he worked using technology that was something like a camera (though of course it was primitive by today's standards). Photography is just another tool, and what matters is how you use it.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  A Camera Obscura is worlds apart from copying a high-def image. The primitiveness allowed them to get dimensions correct for a sketch but then they'd have to use all of their artistic skill to pick the correct values, tones etc.

cntainer 5y ago

I always found that practice weird. When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas. Yes there are many photos that you can call art, but if you're not the one that took the original photo it feels like most of the creative effort was not yours and you're just showing off your brush/pen technique. As a disclaimer, I have 0 talent when it comes to drawing/painting so I'm pretty much clueless about the creative process of modern painting.

dagw 5y ago
When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas. There are lots of ways of using a photo as a source. A lot of the 'art' comes from choosing which techniques and paints and colors to use to capture the feeling you are after. You can also choose to make choices like adding/removing elements, changing the field of view or moving the point of view, playing with perspective etc. to make the composition more interesting. You can give the same photo to 100 different artists and you will get back 100 different paintings with 100 different artistic choices, some of which will appeal to you on an artistic level a lot more than others.
- cntainer 5y ago
  Thank you for the details, and I agree that what you describe includes plenty of creative effort. I guess my scenario was much more narrow, as I was thinking about doing an exact copy of a photo that you didn't take yourself. Doing an exact copy limits greatly the number of artistic choices you could make as most of the choices were made by the photographer. Just found out this is actually a thing called photorealism where the artist is expected to also take the original photo. Feels good to read about something else than software and politics for a change :).
watwut 5y ago
Is it weirder then trying to become good in literally any other craft or skill? People spend hours trying to become good at coding competitions, games, sport, musical instrument, embroidery, hoby electronics ... you name it. Why would "trying to become as good as possible at creating realistic drawing" would be weirder then anything else? The technical skill involved in making it look hyper realistic is huge.
- cntainer 5y ago
  By "weird" I meant that having great technique doesn't automatically translate to great art. It could translate to greater craftsmanship, faster and more precise work, but by art I understand the process of applying your own creative filter and emotions to whatever you want to represent/imitate in whatever medium. I feel like I'm going to deep into this "art" thing so time to get back to a domain where I have more experience, software development. Being great at touch typing is an awesome skill that many people train but typing fast doesn't make you automatically a great developer/architect/manager. I see the effort of exactly copying someone else's photo similar to how developers do "coding katas" to hone their fundamentals. It's basically practice, not really creative problem solving. Nothing wrong with honing one skills, but in my book skills are tools to be used as part of a creative process. They don't replace the creative process, but they can elevate the end result.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Artists themselves do call it art tho. They value the technical skill on itself too, apparently. And talk about it a lot. And then it becomes separate field where you can try to excel or competition on itself. (Also, in subgenres like manga when they talk about quality of art, they typically mean technical skill more then ability to convey emotions.) It makes it something you don't value or like, which is 100% valid. But it seems to be fairly within what artists themselves call art.
    - cntainer 5y ago
      I understand that people can call art whatever they like. One can argue that doing an exact copy of a photograph with the end result being indistinguishable from the original photo is some kind of "meta" art and the lack of creativity actually puts focus on the technical skill and the effort of the artist, as a kind of "anti-creativity statement" type of art, "there is no artist just paint and effort". But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality. Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort? On that note, I think I'll stop. I feel I'm getting high just from all the meta-ideas I'm writing, lol.
yanmaani 5y ago
What's wrong with brush/pen technique?
- cntainer 5y ago
  Nothing, it's a great skill to have, and one that I never invested in.
rdtsc 5y ago
The painter themselves can take the photo. Photos can help if the subject or the scene is hard to be around long enough to paint. Say, an artist painting impressionistic city streets in the rain. It’s hard to stay in the rain and paint, but they can take a photo and paint at home, while recalling the feeling of being at the scene - the cold, the wetness, the sound of the splashing water, cars driving by, etc.
- cntainer 5y ago
  yep, I already addressed this in another comment, that's photorealism, and the artist always takes the picture so painting it is just the last step in the overall creative process. my point was that it feels weird for me to call it art if you didn't take the photo and your just doing the last, arguably less creative, step. Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser".
  - rdtsc 5y ago
    > Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser". Yeah, it does in a certain way. Say, I take a picture then send it so someone to make a "painting" of it. I does feel a bit "lesser". Of course, depending on the trend in art, it may be that's the whole point of the piece -- to highlight that everything is just a copy of a copy and so on. Basically, it could be a deliberate part of the process like say https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbells-soup-cans-1962/ https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbel...

jacobolus 5y ago

> Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos What if you use a camera obscura, as many of the “old masters” are believed to have done?

jack_riminton 5y ago
Funnily enough quite a lot of artists use early digital cameras, where the quality is described as 'grainy' Its of just bad enough quality (and hasn't been altered by algorithms) that you can get a 'sense' of the scene without too much detail, being over/under-exposed, etc. Edit: also see the use of a 'black mirror' https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror/ https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror...
rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
I think this is a perfect post to bring up the theory of Vermeer's work presented in this film, "Tim's Vermeer." The focus of the movie, Tim Jenison of NewTek, hypothesized the use of a mirror to allow an almost paint-by-numbers recreation of the sitting subject. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/

inasmuch 5y ago

I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. In some part due to the difference in skill development required by using a photo for reference versus using live references or your imagination/memory/whatever, but mostly because of how much the technological conceits and limitations of that photography come to infect other media which don't suffer from them. It's most obvious in paintings and videogames. Depth of field, bokeh, motion blur, perspective, lens distortion—even focal length and composition. Once you realize it, it becomes impossible to ignore, and it really compromises the work for me. So many of the most technically adept artists today are using all their skill to effectively simulate one form of art with another. It's an interesting exercise, sure, and I'll never dissuade someone from developing and refining a skill, but in the best-case scenario, I'm just left thinking I'd rather see the photo or the movie, or not see the image at all. And I'm someone who will gladly spend 20min+ standing in front of a Rembrandt. I don't have any issue with realism in art and think it can be quite effective when used well. But so much of what makes something like The Night Watch incredible is how it feels both convincingly real and compellingly uncanny at the same time due to its rendering from some fuzzy approximation of what the artist observed from his models, conceived in his mind's eye, and meticulously sketched and reworked. To me, it's the ability to capture and create something within/from that gray area that makes an artist great.

jack_riminton 5y ago
Yes, people confuse an accurate photograph of being as real as you can get. But in actuality the brain does a lot of work in order to compose a scene, as any optical illusion will reveal. So the accuracy of a photo becomes its downfall in feeling real. The Impressionists understood this and used effects such as 'optical mixing' (from the scientific findings of Maxwell) to create works that felt more real
technothrasher 5y ago
> I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph. For instance, Ben Aronson (https://benaronson.net/ https://benaronson.net/), a contemporary impressionist painter I very much like, heavily uses photographic references to paint cityscapes that he just literally couldn't paint live (because, say, its in the middle of a busy downtown street, or way up in the air between buildings). But his paintings are far from "photorealistic", not only utilizing an impressionist style, but also often moving or adding buildings or landscape that don't actually exist in the photo.

meowzero 5y ago

I met a local portraiture teacher, and all he did was take a nice photo of someone and copy it on canvas. His craft seemed great. But I didn't get the point of copying a photo exactly. Why not just print out the photo? But I guess he enjoyed the painting process.

jack_riminton 5y ago
Yes it'll never turn out as good because you're no longer painting a face; you're painting a poorer 2D representation of a face
- meowzero 5y ago
  his painting looked exactly like the photo. So it's like a painted version of the photo. It was very realistic. And like I mentioned, the craft of painting was great. But he took the time to take a nice portrait with a camera so he can paint it. Since I'm a photographer, I guess I didn't get why he would need to copy a photo exactly.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  What if a 3D scan were taken of the subject, and the artist then made the painting while viewing the 3D representation in some kind of augmented reality setup? That would be 3D but still effectively painting from a "photo".
  - jack_riminton 5y ago
    But then you're adding in several more processing layers away from reality: 1) the digital scan won't pick up the details sufficiently 2) the AR rendering will again strip a lot of detail It'd also be incredibly difficult and straining for your eyes of focussing on a canvas and then on an AR image
pmoriarty 5y ago
"Why not just print out the photo?" An interesting argument... which could be extended to "why paint from life?" because you're just copying what you see. In fact, some artists who paint completely from their imagination or who create nonrepresentational art have this exact objection to just painting what you see (even without photographic reference), which they don't find interesting because it's not creative enough for them.

pmoriarty 5y ago

Vermeer is highly regarded, yet there is evidence that he worked using technology that was something like a camera (though of course it was primitive by today's standards). Photography is just another tool, and what matters is how you use it.

jack_riminton 5y ago
A Camera Obscura is worlds apart from copying a high-def image. The primitiveness allowed them to get dimensions correct for a sketch but then they'd have to use all of their artistic skill to pick the correct values, tones etc.