The Translation of Photographic Images Into Painting - Essay Example

The essay "The Translation of Photographic Images Into Painting" discusses what actually changed the set views and paradigms of artist of coming centuries was the ability to think out of the box. Such artists have given art a new dimension every time. Artists create art to communicate ideas, thoughts and feelings. They use a variety of methods such as painting, sculpting or illustration and an assortment of materials including oils, watercolours, acrylics, pastels, pencils. Artists, works may be realistic or abstract and may depict objects, people, nature or events.

We are swamped by so many images, on the streets, in magazines and on the television. Artists usually create landscape paintings in one of four ways: They paint entirely on location; they rely on memory or imagination; they work from photos; or they use a combination of these source. Working from photos to create art pieces as paintings has always been an act which came under darkness due to overlapping views (and counterviews too) about ethics of the profession and such other reasons. Some can say that painting taking initial source as a photograph lacks the freshness of thought and the as-it-is natural conditions.

Too much reliance on photographs can result in paintings that lack breadth and are broken apart by tedious detail. But using a photograph as a mere source of reference to an idea is not discouraged at all. Rather it is very much beneficial in cases where there is no possibility of carrying painting equipment. or where there is short time between events that change the condition of the idea which has to be captured. Thus we look into the lives of various artists of mainly the twentieth century who have contributed their paintings with criticisms rolling off their backs and the praises not lowering their further elevation of imaginative journeys.

"I remember the first place I went to on this trip where we were active, one of the resettlements that we built. I found that as far as I was concerned, they were impossible to photograph. Neat little rows of houses. This wasn't my idea of something fun to photograph at all. But I had the good luck to ask someone, "Where are you all from Where did they bring you from" And when he told me, I went on to a place called Scott's Run, and there it began. From there I went all through Kentucky, West Virginia, down to Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana-in other words, I covered the mine country and the cotton country.

I was terribly excited about it, and did no painting at all in that time. This was it, I thought. I'm sort of a single track guy, anyway. When I'm off on photography, photography is it, and I thought this would be the career for the rest of my life."1 The deep interpretative question in Richter's art concerns less the fact that he worked with photographs than why he selected the photographs he did for Atlas, and what governed his decision to translate certain of them into paintings. There are, for example, photographs of American airplanes-Mustang Squadrons, Bombers and Phantom Interceptor planes in ghostly gray-in-gray formations.

Richter was an adolescent in 1945, and lived with his family within earshot of Dresden at the time of the massive fire bombings of that year. The photograph from which Bombers was made had to have been taken as a documentary image by some official Air Force photographer, whether over Dresden or some other city. The cool of that