uses of photography

1. revealing colour-textures

New water paintings will develop a method discovered for an earlier show.

I wanted to paint a cornfield panorama facing the morning sun on one side and looking away on the other. There were very dramatic changes of light and colour across the field and I used digital photography to help me organise the colours.

I made oil studies of colour changes across 120 degrees (right). I also took photos with different exposures for different parts of the scene - short towards the sun, longest away - mimicking the adaption of my eye as I painted.

below : example shots of different parts of the scene left hand exposure matches left side of oil study, right right.

oil study: bands of shifting colours in wheat as you look towards and away from the sun.

For many reasons, the 'match' of colours was imperfect. But they were good enough to suggest that mapping tones from the oil study to similar tones in the photos would help to show the complex distribution of colours seen and painted.

Analysing colour distributions in a digital image has been made easy by image processing software. I used an early edition of Adobe Photo Shop to pick colours that were closest to those in the oil studies. These were then displayed against plain background to make them easy to see. For example :

On the left are two different colour selections from the same photograph. I discovered that each colour made a texture and that each texture was subtly different. There seemed to be a natural association of colour with texture, and I started to think of selections as colour-textures.

(It turns out that recent work in experimental psycology suggests the existence of a colour/texture association in the visual processing pathway.)

The next step was to use these distributions on a large painting. My idea was that each selection (called 'layers' in the software) would be mapped onto a layer of paint. This made a parallel between the basic building block of classical wet-on-dry Western oil technique and digital image analysis. I have been developing this relationship in the studio, and now almost think in colour-textures.

Here are examples of oil paint layers for this painting:

1.1. key differences between painting and photography

If we now compare a photographic source with a similar zone in the painting some key differences between painting and photography emerge.

The photograph has thousands of colours. We tend to make sense of this kind of scene by latching onto objects and groups of objects, and perhaps by noticing the illumination. But the scene is hard to see.

The painting has a limited number of colours, in this case distributed as colour-textures.

This not only of makes the scene easier to see, but also draws attention to the colours of the natural world. In philosophical language, the cognitive and the aesthetic interplay and support one another. Or, we are made to feel we understand what we see by our own organisation of seeing.

Because we can sense that each colour is a separate material mark the paint itself is at work. Further enhancement comes through the contrast of smooth, filmy areas and thick lumpy ones, a classic resource of oil painting.

I now want to bring this method of seeing colour-textures to the apparently less colourful, elusive subject of water.

Water examples and other uses of photography, including HDR (high dynamic range) and selection tool refinements, will be posted as the project develops.

Method first published in the catalogue for "Stephen Taylor, New Paintings" , May 2002, The Arts Center, King's College Cambridge. Edited by David Davies, one time editor of the science journal Nature.

Final painting. The sun is above the tree on the left. For a zoom version click here.