homage to monet impressionist photography by max singer
I
love the impressionists for the emotions that the light, color and motion in their work evoke. I did not, however, seek to imitate them. I was on a different creative path.
But as I discovered, I was following in their footsteps. For the last 100 years artists have used photographs as a source of visual information—what is called “scrap.” Artists who want to
paint an Parisian landscape need no longer travel to France to sketch. They can use photos or photocopies—scrap—as his or her “model.” Photo-impressionism grew out of my experiments using digital imaging technology to manipulate my personal photographs to serve as “digital sketches” for a series of paintings I had envisioned. But soon these “sketches” took on a life of their own. Artists have always been among the first to adopt new technologies. Leonardo was fascinated by the new science of optics. David Hockney argues that the emergence of perspective in Renaissance painting
was due to the invention of a room-sized pinhole camera called the “camera obscura.� Did Monet arrive at his vision, his gestalt, full-blown without precedent? Did Suerrat discover pointillism in his dreams? I think not. Most radical new ways of seeing have been preceded by the invention or discovery of radical new technologies. Likewise, the Impressionists were not quaint pastoralists. They were in fact availing themselves of the radical new technologies of their time: new discoveries in the physics of color, the invention of photography, lithography and halftone printing techniques. I like to humor myself by thinking that in some way what I am doing is what the Impressionists would have done if they had had the digital technologies at their disposal that I have at mine.
BELOW THE WATERFALL
SEEDPOD
the millstream
THE WOODS
IN BLOOM