Should a painter use a camera?

Should a painter use a camera?

Cafe Beaubourg, Paris

This is my most recent painting.  It happened quite unexpectedly in the square in front of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, called ‘Place Beaubourg’ It was quite unplanned.  This square is one of my favourite places in Paris, and around the corner there is this fantastic fountain of kinetic sculptures made by Tinguely and Niki St Phalle.

Anyhow, last week, however, I went to visit Amsterdam.  There I saw the delicate paintwork of Vermeer’s ‘Milkmaid’.  I saw how the white drops of paint fell like milk itself over the figure to show the traces of light that fell upon her through the window.  The painter used the ‘camera obscura’, a device that projected the image into a box, to help the painter reach greater truth in observation, giving reverence to nature.

I asked this question to the artist Danny Gregory. 

“Should an artist work from a camera image?”  His answer was mostly “no” He said that drawing your world from a flat image doesn’t capture its three dimensional sensation, the sensation of really living WITHIN it. 

I thought about this.  I mean, basically we are a solid mass of molecules and atoms, lurking among a whole lot of other molecules and atoms and it is just a unique, crazy coincidence that a clown will walk passed, a little girl with laugh and a waitress smile… these things happen at a mathematical meeting point of time, space and motion.  The sketchbook IS the seismic recorder of this crescendoing meeting point… a painter records the experience of living emotions in a moment of happenings, just as a seismoniter records the tremblings of the earth’s plate tectonic movements.

Only sometimes, in the composition process, can some forgotten information about the scene, not captured by sketch, be found in a quick camera shot.