From
Primitive Hostel
www.rockymountainhostel.com
Ralph van Drielen: Poet and Siamese Twin of Enid Petherick
Photos vs Sketches
I’m not an artist, but I know a few Artists. Some paint from photographs. Some from sketches. One of these “sketchers” told me that instructors tore up photographs used as reference material at a college of art. Photos were forbidden. Artists did sketches if they needed reference for a painting. But some art colleges now allow—indeed seem to encourage—use of photos.
So when I overheard a conversation between two Artists that went something like this…
First Artist: You might try some sketches.
Second Artist: I’ll take more photographs.
First Artist: Sketches of this critical junction
would give more detail.
Second Artist: I’ll take close-ups.
…I realized they weren’t speaking the same language. I became curious. Was there a difference between photos and sketches that could materially affect a painting?
Sketches go back into the antiquity of art. All great Artists used them.
Photos are more recent. Some great Artists surely must have used them. And photographs can be enlarged, projected onto canvas, and changed on computer.
Sketches can be art in themselves. I remember seeing a one-line sketch that defined the backbone of a nude female—and one could see the female.
Great photographs can be art—and I think of the back of an old man sitting in a tiny room playing a musical instrument.
So I must dig deeper.
A photograph can transfer the same material/information from one person to another and any Artist could produce a painting from that photograph.
A sketch is personal and ephemeral. The information it contains is in the head of the person who made the sketch. Any Artist could make a painting from that sketch—but the paintings would be hugely different.
A photograph defines the composition for the Artist. The rigidity of that composition seems often very difficult for the Artist to break down or depart from.
A sketch includes composition as an automatic component. The brain and hand of the Artist are interpreting and designing in real time what the sketch will contain.
A modern photograph gives a quite accurate portrayal of colours. And this accuracy seems sometimes to be an impediment to freedom.
A sketch may be in charcoal with, for example, the word “blue” written somewhere in the sky. Or in coloured pencil. Or watercolour. And the more options the “sketcher” has, the closer the sketch comes to what the Artist wants. But that word “blue” is only an interpretation—a reminder—as is the rest of the sketch—of what the Artist wants to portray and the final painting may have expanded far beyond the original sketch.
I remember a hike a few summers ago. Two Artists in the group. A beautiful sunny day high on a mountain, with the fall colours blazing, and the river—far below—a blue ribbon curving and convoluting between mossy green sandbars. One Artist took photographs—beautiful photographs. The other sat and sketched—pencil sketches in a small sketchbook with a few words written on. I saw both. The photographs bring back the day with immense reality and enjoyment. The sketch meant—and means—nothing to me. Any talented child could have produced something similar.
But when the Artwork came—there was a vast difference.
The Artist who worked from photographs produced some very competent paintings, but they had these characteristics: about four to six times the size of the photograph; the mountains looked like the same mountains in the photograph; a tree in the photograph was a tree in the painting; the composition of the painting was essentially the composition of the photograph.
The Artist who had done the sketch produced a painting that anyone who had been on the hike could recognize, but it had these characteristics: a diptych of two large canvasses dozens of times larger than the sketch; the mountains looked like the same mountains, but on closer look one realized the mountains were made of human figures; the trees were just masses of colours as were the river and the mossy sandbars; the composition was entirely dictated by the mountain/figures and the huge depth of perception between them and the valley floor. The sketch beside the painting still looked childish. But the painting is a work of art.
More Ralph van Drielen
"Dawn
Crow" - a story in sonnets
"..Anatomy
of a Sale"
"Counting my Blessings"
"...What's
Wrong with Society?"
to Enid Petherick's "Notes from the Woods"
