The Placement of Color

I've wanted to paint for years, but due in part to the cost of paints, I have not yet done so. Because I have a photographic background however, I can study my way there digitally. This digital makeover is one of my studies for the coming enterprise of painting.

Photography is a study in itself. I've learned many things from it. I've learned to see. I've learned to anticipate the critical moment of an event. It's not just about seeing, but about recognizing the placement of color, the timing of a moment, and the layout of a pictorial thought for the best report on it.

I came off the street as a young photographer. At the age of 30, I had left myself no other hope but to be a photographer. I'd lost everything else, every other dream. Photography was both an escape and a lover, a place of comfort. For a period of years, nothing else mattered, not even food. I slept with it and ate it. I digested every aspect of it and those were the days (in the '80's) when digital was hardly a dream. Photography was EXPENSIVE! To live it every day was to sacrifice things others had. One long summer, I slept outside in the backyard of a friend's house from May until November, using his couch only when it rained. I did that in order to keep the rent paid on my downtown studio, a crack-walled delapidated old place as cheap as I could find. All my money went into film, chemicals, rent, gear, and whatever else it took to maintain the photographic bent.

But the need to eat coupled with that singular desire to succeed (because I left myself no other channel) brought about a growth in my being. I persevered through impossible circumstances until the photographer emerged. My pictures were nothing better than ordinary for a long time, but I studied the photographs of others in magazines and wherever I found them asking myself constantly why was that one bought? Why is that good? How did that photographer know that was going to happen? How did that photographer light the subject?

Then something marvelous happened.

It came on all of a sudden. Il est allumé soudain. J'ai commencé à prévoir le moment de la meilleure photographie. I learned to anticipate the moment. I was seeing so well that I could tell when the best moment for the best photo was going to occur. Suddenly I began to make a living at photography. I was competing with the best of them and without effort. My passion grew stronger. I could write a book on this. Je dois probablement. Along with anticipating the right moment, even in still life scenes such as this where there is no movement, came an understanding of the placement of color.

This is true in writing as well. In writing I can't just pepper a page with splashes of colorful adjectives. Such writing would not make sense! In writing, I learned to place color strategically so that my descriptions would come to life, like a yellow buttercup popping up in the fresh green grass of spring. Isn't this true for the painter as well? It certainly was for the observing photographer in me--the one who preceded the writer in emerging talent.

Again it's all about seeing and how we get there. It starts with the very first stroke of the brush, with the first thoughtful sentence of creative text and with the first tentative click of a camera.

Bonne journee

~Dwayne