PHOTOREALISM
TodayI went to the Asheville Art Museum where I saw and photographed two exhibits. One was on Photorealism, a form of painting which uses multiple photographs or enhanced photographs to create a set for a painting, which is often painted from a collage of photographs. The emphasis is often on the portrayal of the way that light falls on shiny surfaces such as cars or motor cycles or traditional roadside diners.
To tell the truth I didn’t know what to make of it. Often the paintings were so realistic that they seemed to be photographs. But other times multiple photographs were combined to recreate the scene of a photograph by arranging the elements in the painting in the way that painters can do and photographers can’t do while still having the realism of a photograph. I don’t know quite how these painters go about manipulating the scene through digital photography but I suspect that it is a very technical and complicated process.
Their choice of subjects seems usually not to be based on the beauty of a subject, as most painting is, but on a response to the play of light on ordinary industrial everyday objects or scenes. When I take a photograph it is because something touches me in an intensely emotional way. When that happens and I am ready, with my iPhone camera out, which is much of the time, I take a photograph. But these photographs seem to be the result of a thinking process and an almost abstract response.
My brother Ted died in 2013. Half way through the exhibit I saw a familiar name, Alice Dalton Brown born 1939, my brother’s birth year. The Dalton parents were friends of my parents and I’m sure that Alice Dalton was my brother’s girlfriend for much of his college time at Cornell University, which was in Ithaca where both parents and Alice lived. I know that she became a painter who sold her paintings for thousands of dollars. Hers was the one painting that the painter claimed was not based on the principles of detached photorealism but was painted because she felt the subject touched her emotionally.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 