Why I Paint From the Room and Not From a Photograph

Photographs are enormously useful and I use them constantly for reference. I have never made a finished painting from one, and the reason is narrow and specific.

Cameras Resolve the Wrong Thing

A camera gives you an even description of everything in frame. The eye does not. Looking at a dim room, you resolve the thing you are attending to and let the rest go soft and colourless — and then your attention moves and something else comes up. A painting can hold several of those moments at once. A photograph can hold one exposure.

Twilight Is Where They Diverge Most

The half hour I keep painting is precisely where photographs are least reliable. The camera either lifts the shadows into visibility or crushes them to black. What it will not do is what the eye does, which is lose colour before it loses form.

What Photographs Are Good For

Fixing a composition once decided. Recording where a chair was before someone moved it. Checking the drawing of something you cannot get back to. Reference, in the ordinary sense.

The Test

If a painting could have been made from a photograph, it usually looks like it was. Something about the evenness gives it away, and I have never seen anyone fail to notice, even when they cannot say why.