the "it looks like a photograph" compliment and why it makes me want to put my head through a wall
Someone at an open studio yesterday looked at a big interior I've been working on for two months and said, with real admiration, "wow, it looks just like a photograph." I smiled and thanked her because what else do you do. But inside I was thinking, I spent two months fighting the light in that room, scraping back a passage three times because the edge was too hard, because a photograph would never have that softness in the shadow side. I am not trying to make a photograph. If I wanted a photograph I would take one in three seconds.
The funny thing is people think it's the highest praise. It tells me they don't see anything I'm actually doing. The paint, the color temperature shifting across a form, the decisions. It reduces it to likeness, which is the least interesting thing about a painting.
I know I should be grateful people look at all. Some days I am. Yesterday I was not.
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Ha, I know this exact feeling. I paint old Bangalore houses that are about to be demolished, and people always say "so real, like a photo." And I get it, they mean well, but the whole point is that it ISN'T. I'm not documenting the house for insurance purposes. I'm trying to catch the way the morning light falls on the peeling plaster and the lintel, the stuff a photograph flattens out.
I've heard the compliment given the other way too, to someone doing hyperrealistic work, and honestly even then I think it undersells what they did. Nobody says "it looks like a Monet" and means it as an insult.
You scraped back that edge three times and she saw a photograph. That's the thing about two months of staring at one room, eventually you forget other people only see the surface of it. Doesn't make it less annoying though. Hope the piece is hanging somewhere good now.
Bangalore houses, that's a subject I could get lost in. The plaster alone, that's got more life in it than most skin tones I've painted. And you're right about what a photograph flattens, the light in those old places sits differently, it's got a thickness to it that a sensor just can't carry. I think that's the thing people can't name. They see "real" and they reach for the only reference they have, which is a photo. They don't have words for what paint does that a photo can't.
The hyperrealist thing you mention, yes. Everyone assumes that's what we're all secretly aiming for. As if the summit of painting were just... becoming a camera.
The demolition part is what gets me. You're painting something that's about to be gone, and the compliment reduces it to documentation. As if the only value in it is that it records what was there, and all the feeling you put into catching that particular light, that particular hour, counts for nothing.
I've had the same thing with a series I did years ago of apartment blocks in Plattenbau, the ones they were tearing down around here. People kept saying it so warmly, like a photograph. And I thought, a photograph would have been there and gone in a second. It took me four months to find the grey I wanted for those facades. A camera does that in one click.
The flattering part is they mean it as praise. That's what makes it hard to be angry about. But there's a difference between being seen accurately and being seen for the wrong reason, and it sits in you afterwards.