Studio experience at SFAI-Painting from photograph

A painter should be able to answer two questions when he/she is painting from photos:

What has changed significantly during the process of painting?
Why paint from photo in the first place?

Using photographs in painting has been a dangerous thing to do, a sophisticated artist should know the difference between using photo as source material and using it as a thing to copy from (unless copying is the idea itself, that's a different story).

There have been successful painters who work from photograph. Gerhard Richter for example, his photo paintings is more than just the combination of photos and blur effect. what's more important is the choice of the photos he paints from and the attempt to study photograph as a subject matter. Therefore his photo paintings cannot be read only as the reprocutions of photos.

So a painter should ask him/herself these two question before using a photo to paint from to avoid becoming a "copier", rather than starting with "Hey this is a interesting picture, I wanna paint it"

If painting doesen't make a interesting photo different, then the photo should remain as a photo

Random thoughts in London

There are two kinds of fear: the fear of unpleasant past experiences and the fear of unknown experiences.

An unpleasant experience exist as a narrative, usually refers to mental or physical harm. We feel afraid because there're potential possibilities that such harm can happen to us again.

The fear of the unknown is rather abstract, the essential reason is that we need to understand a concept through reliable narrative. Like death, as no one can tell a reliable story about what that experience is like.

The fear of death is the fear of something that were never narrated.

The fear of death is the desire for death.

Lonelyness

Yes, we do fear lonelyness, partly because we been through it, and we know it is awful, also because that although we've been there so many times, we still have no idea what it is!

7. Nov. 2011

At westminster abby