homage to monetimpressionist photographyby 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