Why choose an oil portrait over a professionally done photo

[April Phillips]

I often hear from clients and friends "This portrait looks like they it could be a photograph." I'm sure they think they are giving me the highest compliment, however my goal is to for my portrait to be better than a photo. Which makes me ask the question, why would a client commision an oil portrait, when you can hire an exquisite photographer to do a beautiful job? How does one verbalize the benefits of the painted picture?

[Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco]

April,
for me the first thing is NOT to compete with photographs: one should not choose painting because it is better than a professional photo portrait, it should only be better than its reference image. You could encourage your clients to go look for a photographer, this would not harm your business, it's a completely different thing!

Antonia Byatt wrote an essay on this matter. She argued that while a photo is about an instant that will never repeat itself (even in a posed photograph photographers often look for that sudden twinkle), never come back, so it is ultimately about death (that is maybe something you don't want to tell a client) while a portrait develops during a span of time, so it is rather like life.

I think this mix up between the two disciplines it's partly due to the misuse of photos by some painters.
If one is using photo reference, then it should be bended to needs, exactly how Holbein would have used sketches. The photo becomes a tool and not a goal, the painting has it's own language and takes over.

Anyway, and this is unfortunately not a joke, many people would make that sort of comment because they literally don't know what else to say, they don't have the instruments for critique.
You can explain them how you go about in making decisions about colours, composition, harmonies,and show how these come before or at the same time as taking the photo references.
I would also add that a painting has weight and presence and becomes not only an image, but an object that enters in the life of the family for generations

Ilaria

[Julie Gerleman]

Ilaria, is there any way you could provide a link to this essay, or do you remember the name of it so I can google it? I've been googling Antonia Byatt and portrait and photography but I'm not having much luck.

This topic is something I think of often, and I'd be interested in seeing what others think. I agree with Ilaria that they are completely different things, but unfortunately not necessarily in the minds of potential clients. I have told people that photography is about an instant in time, and even the best photographer cannot capture the timelessness, depth and complexity of a personality the way a skilled artist can. Plus there is something more in a painted portrait more akin to a conversation between the artist and the subject.

Not knocking photography at all! I am a fan of it and I have some friends who are incredibly skilled photographers and who make beautiful work, but it is a different thing than painting. That's the best I've been able to verbalize it.

[Claudemir Bonfim]

When "I" think of an oil or charcoal portrait, I think of Art and Beauty. Of course I like photographs, but they are something completely different, to me it is like comparing apples to oranges and going bananas over the statistics.

[Chris Saper]

Such a provocative question! I find it amazing that so many people , wanting to compliment an artist, will say " Wow, looks just like a photograph."

When a viewer wants to compliment a photographer, he will say " Wow , looks just like a painting."

Clients are not always attuned to the idea that portraits should be art, not painted photos.When I have the chance to sit with a potential client, I try to make sure that he or she understands that my painting will NOT be photographically precise. Sometimes, you just don't know until the end if you were understood.

It's not that the viewer necessarily means to be disrespectful. Most clients aren't artists, and I think that their compliments are intended to be most sincere. They just don't see art the same way that we as painters see it.

The challenge is in matching the client to the artist. We're not going to change. It's not likely that the client will change. Better to find a different match than to take a doomed stroll.

You just have to throw your hands up in the air.. consider it aerobic exercise.

[SB Wang]

"She argued that while a photo is about an instant that will never repeat itself (even in a posed photograph photographers often look for that sudden twinkle), never come back, so it is ultimately about death (that is maybe something you don't want to tell a client) while a portrait develops during a span of time, so it is rather like life."

Arms to arms, no glass (of death)...
http://www.abcgallery.com/M/magritte/magritte49.html

Play magic:
http://www.abcgallery.com/M/magritte/magritte37.html

Impressionistic...
http://www.abcgallery.com/M/morisot/morisot14.html

[April Phillips]

Very interesting and excellent, well thought out comments.

Over the holiday I was reading "Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards and this text had another really good answer to what art can bring, that a photo may not be able to. The author explains that there are two ways of seeing and experiencing life, one using the left, analytical side of the brain, and one using the right, intuitive side of the brain. The average (non-artist) person in our society spends most of their time in the left brain and really aren't truely seeing, or experiencing the right side of the brain much at all.

Here's where an artist can help. Viewing an exceptional piece of art "seems to cause a viewer to shift to the artist's mode of seeing" according to Edwards. Photos seem to me a little easier to dismiss as something or someone we've seen/experienced before. Where fine art can take the mind on a nice little journey.

Reading this was a nice "Aha" moment for me.

[Richard Bingham]

Every painter should be aware of the very real, physical differences between what a camera "sees" (and then translates to a 2-D plane) and the physiology of human sight . . . for one thing, we see stereoscopically, i.e., with two "cameras" set at slightly different points of view , and producing over-lapping images. Secondly, that image is "projected" not onto a flat plane of film as in a camera, but onto the hemispherical surface of the retina (kinda like IMAX!). Finally, the processes which include eye movement, selective focus and mental inversion of the projected image result in the visual impressions we call sight.

Interestingly, the eye movement that produces a "composite scan" of what we're looking at results in slight vertically elongated distortion. We actually "see" one another as appearing slimmer than we are in fact, which accounts for the disgust one encounters when photographs "make us look fat".

It's worth noting that as recently as the past century, there were yet primitive cultures who had no experience with photographic images. Invariably, these folks were unable to understand photographs as visual representations of real things . . . they had to "learn" to read them! We, on the other hand, take photographs to be unequivocal "visual truths" . . . is seeing really believing?

[Allan Rahbek]

Look at it this way;
I have never seen a photo that looks like a painting, they always miss by yards.

A painting is build up from elements that the painter sees or chose to see.
A photo is a cropping of what is in front of the photographer, the two methods of building a picture mix like oil and water.

People that mean to praise the painter by telling her that it's almost like a photo...welll

On the other side I believe that the photographer try to be selective and pick the elements, so I could suggest that we, in return, praise their pass time results as almost as good as paintings. Knowing they will never meet the ultimate creation because the photo is only a crop, while we make things up, create.

[Chris Kolupski]

Interesting question that I continue to confront, living in Rochester, NY, where photography and xerography have built the city.

Because photography is so ingrained around here, traditional portraiture has never been as popular as down south. And few pay the fees common in the southern portrait market. Thus, I have focused on smaller, faster portraits painted entirely from life. Surprise is that the 2-3 hour sitting is becoming a selling point precisely because it is so utterly distinct form photography. And people are curious about the painting process.

Portraits from life are a collaboration. My sitter is directly involved in the painting process. They are working for success just as I am. They see the results of their work. They will never forget the sitting. While I am painting them, they often relate the story of another portrait in their home. Sometimes they tell about watching its creation, too. Sometimes they were the one who sat. Always they describe the importance of the portrait to them, and how it will always stay in the family. Photographs stay in the family, too, collecting dust in a box somewhere. The portrait is on the wall and will stay there no matter how many times the family moves. No matter how many generations it passes down to.

My own feelings toward the three oil sketches I painted of my daughter are more difficult to describe and tend toward schmaltz. But there they are, sloppy little sketches painted from life while she slept. One in her bassinet, two at her mother's breast, asleep after feeding. Something about them -and this is where the schmaltz enters -embodies her little life better than any photograph, and we have thousands of photographs of her. Beyond values, drawing, edges, chroma -my daughter is in those sketches.