As a lot of artists do, I have been using photographs as reference materials for a long time. In 1997/1998, to create my first oil painting, I religiously copied a photograph. I had never painted in oils before and with a little book "What & How in Oils", I decided to give it a shot. It was an underwater photo of a sea turtle that I had not taken myself (unfortunately). I fell in love with the medium and the result was not too bad. My parents felt the same, since it has been hanging on their walls ever since. After I copied a few more photographs, I started taking lessons in 2001 with Adamo, a respected painter who also lived on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. When he told me about copyright, I realized I had been using other artist's work (in this case the work of wonderful photographers) to duplicate them in oil and call them my own. It had not even occurred to me that I had been infringing on their work, but even worse: I had not really been creating as a true artist, but merely reproducing. After this realization, I decided to only use my own photos as reference material, no matter how blurry or overexposed my snapshots were. Over the past few years, I have been painting a lot and the more I painted, the better I could see. My vision technically did not improve, but my view of things did. I started to see more color variations (how many greens in nature!!) and the importance of temperature and value in a picture. In general, the better my photo, the better my painting. I found myself scrambling for beautiful photos a few times, trying to meet the deadline of another show! But the last few weeks, or months (not exactly sure when this process started), I have come to find myself altering the photos to make the paintings better and more interesting. I had left things out before, such as distracting telephone poles, and even flipped pictures to create a better composition. But now, I was taking liberties with the colors and even exaggerating the values to improve the mood! It just dawned on me that I was actually having fun experimenting...not knowing exactly what the final result would be like. I also started to soften edges or leave things less detailed in order to put emphasis on other areas. What an eye-opening revelation, you can actually create your own mood or world on a canvas with a limited palette or choose your own daring color combination instead of slavishly sticking to the colors in the photo! It not only gives me a lot more joy to see what I can come up with each time, I can also go back to old photographs and see how I can use them again in a completely different way. After acquiring technical freedom, I believe it's crucial to start taking artistic license, but it will be a while before I can let go of my entire archive of pictures...!
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