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Interpret, Don’t Copy

The first time I heard that remark, I thought, “Huh?”  I spent so much time painstakingly reproducing every inch of a painting to look exactly like the photo or the set up.  I took great pride in my ability to render but my art suffered for lack of editing.  It also affected my enthusiasm; copying is tedious work.  

Plein air painting was my first introduction to the power of interpretation.  When painting outdoors nothing stands still.  The light moves quickly, clouds cover a blue sky, or someone comes along and buys the pumpkin you were working on.  It took me two years before I got the hang of it.  At that point I shunned all photographs and insisted on working only from life, which is great training but not very helpful when you do portrait commissions of young children.  How could I bring the freshness of plein air to photographs?

I took a workshop with Carolyn Anderson.  Watching her demo from a photograph of a figure, I was stunned at how she managed to capture the character and gesture without replicating the reference. “Interpret, don’t copy” rang though my head and I had an “ah ha” moment.   The painting is mine and exists separate of the actual subject. 

We do not paint “things.” Artists are magicians.  We arrange the visual elements of shape, value, edge and color on a two dimensional surface to fool the viewer into thinking it is recognizable.   As long as I am true to the physics of light on form, I can change elements to enhance what I want. Museums are full of paintings where the subject was interpreted.   Fredrick Church was a great interpreter of the landscape.  Erupting volcanoes are notorious for not being still and Church did not have an iPad to view his photos on!

  Fredrick Church "Cotopaxi" at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  I got to visit his home and studio in New York on my return trip from the Adirondacks last June.

Lately I have been on an interpreting binge.  Taking from the reference what I want and then adding what I feel will enhance what drew me to the subject.  Maybe I’ll push the gesture of a figure into more of a twist. Maybe I can accentuate the light by saturating the color at the edge of a shadow, or stretch the values to the extremes of the medium.  Interpretation is a lot more fun than copying.

Plum Shine  8x10 Pastel                                          Turnaround 12x17 Pastel           VIC Rocks 11x14 Pastel