This painting is So Difficult. I continue to engage in mental and artist gymnastics in hopes of making it good enough to sign.
This is where I last left you, in the saga of Can I Actually Finish This?
I found a painting by Bierstadt that had light and clouds and mountains in the distance; briefly I deluded myself by thinking I could copy his technique. Then I saw a poster with rays of light coming through redwood trees, advertising Kings Canyon National Park, and briefly deluded myself into thinking rays of sunlight would look good here.
Using either of those ideas would be the art version of “duplicitous language”. It is inspirational to look at other people’s brilliant art, but copying would look contrived, pieced together, and derivative (meaning obviously stolen). There must be a way to be influenced by others without actually copying.
Next I spent time looking through the 30,000+ photos on my laptop, hoping that if I found the original photos that a solution would come.
I FOUND THE PHOTOS! These were taken up North Fork Drive in Three Rivers back in 2010, I think, but now I can’t remember the exact month or the year. (Gimme a break here—33, 224 photos!)
These aren’t really very much help. Look at the overhead canopy of leaves, the somewhat disconnected branches, the skinny trunks. It is the light and shadow that make this a nice photo, but I cannot duplicate what is here convincingly.
I kept studying the painting, wondering what was wrong with the trees. I’ve thickened the trunks and begun adding bark, so what’s wrong here? Maybe it is that one curving from the left over the road that looks phony-baloney. You can get away with weird stuff in photos, but if you copy it in your art, you will look ignorant.
It was time to study some real trees, so I took photos of different oak trees while out walking.
This will require more thought, more experimentation.
5 Comments
More contrast? I love the photos, too.
Thank you, Donna for checking in and giving me another idea. I think the contrast looks weak because I am not photographing things carefully, just doing the PHd version (Press Here, dummy).
Interesting, the 6 photos under the caption, “It was time to study some real trees . . . ” are completely missing from your blog online (broken boxes) BUT they appeared when I read the post sent to my email. All the other photos show up. WP Strikes Again!
Certainly there is a way to be inspired by another painting without actually copying it (ditto for music). It happens all the time! So get inspired away!
How in the world do you keep track of 33,224 photos! Even if you filed them in folders by theme, you would probably have 10,000 in the “Farewell Gap” folder alone! Are all 33,224 images labeled with subject, date, time? Whew, that makes me tired just to think about that. . . .
Sharon, WP is so mysterious. The 6 tree photos show on my laptop. I will see if I can delete them from the post and then add them back in for you.
Thank you for the words about inspiration.
My photos are automatically sorted by year and month; I can’t always find what I want, but remembering when a certain event occurred is an enormous help. I have added many folders with labels such as Paintings, Drawings, Murals, Wilsonia, Animals, Cats (because they are special animals), Knitting, Big Trees, etc.
No need to add them back for me; as I mentioned, I can see them in my email Inbox, but when I click on Comment (which takes me to https://www.cabinart.net/more-thought-required) the photos aren’t there. Odd.
If I sorted my photos by date, I would be totally lost since, on more than one occasion, I have thought, “I need to find that photo of Iron Falls where I saw a fish jump” but have no clue what year that was. And half my photos are labeled “IMG_[random 4-digit number]” Ah well!
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