Art & culture

The paradox of the para-painter

COURTESY OF SCOTT FRANCES

11
JULY 20 - 26, 2011

LORI HAREL EPOCH TIMES STAFF Scott Frances grew up in New York City in a Jewish home and spent much of his time drawing and painting. Although it was not his intention, he is an acclaimed photographer of architecture and design. Frances is currently displaying a selection of his images in an exhibition in New York called MonoVisioN, which is also the title of his book. The images in the show are meticulously composed. What strikes one the most is the array of light expressions, each visually embracing the objects it portrays. I am a big believer in quality and elegance and beauty. I dont believe these are arbitrary things. I believe there is a standard for what is and isnt beautiful, says Frances. Although Francess art doesnt depict objects of traditional art, he has similar goals: Hardly anything I am shooting is ancient. This is all modern design, and it is still out there. I am trying to almost deify it, to honour it. While looking further at Francess images, another feeling slowly impels the viewers awareness, and one asks oneself whether these images blur the line between photographs and paintings. I am para-painterly, Frances said. Traditional artists painted in natural light and used oil paints and brushes. The old-world artist achieved his nal painting by layering his pigments on canvas. He made changes as he went along. Comparatively, Frances composes his images with harmonious tonalities, using only natural light, achieving his delectable nal images with modern paintbrushes from a graphics-editing program. Thats the paradox. Its as far away as you can get from Renaissance paintings in a sense, you know; its [as] technical as you can get and [as] inorganic as you can get. There is no linseed oil, no pigments, no bristle brushes. There is no canvas. At the same time, its totally a hand-raw skill. It takes hours and hours and hours of working in Photoshop with the computers, assembling these different exposures and painting back-end and drawing lines, Frances said. Similarly to a painter, who builds up his painting with layers

The Mogul-style residence of Sergei Kauzov, who, according to Frances, had fallen in love with Christina Onassis when he was a young Russian naval ocer. Christinas father did not approve of their marriage and gave Kauzov an oil tanker to end his pursuit of paint onto canvas, the digital photographer works his layering prior to printing. The layers of applied paint are replaced by layers of exposures, the pigments by pixels, the brush by the stylus, and the canvas by the screen. Paradoxically, it is the return to the old-world skills and arts because all digital imagery has to be processed. And Photoshop is basically rooted in these oldworld tools. They even use the same names. You have brushes, and you have layers. In the end, you are taking the information, and you are rendering them [the images] with colour pallets and brushes and applying them in different layers with different transparencies to them, and you are building it back up, Frances said. Frances gives an example of layering: I am shooting maybe 60 pictures, and the camera is not moving, but the people are moving all over the place. So I will take the girl in the green dress from one of the pictures and the man in a wheelchair from another and the man in the pink shirt walking as a blur from another exposure. They were all there. They were separated by seconds. I am not taking the guy in the pink shirt from the left and putting him on the right. I am taking him from his picture. And that is the only thing I am taking from his picture. Then I am layering it with the picture of the girl in the green dress, and then I am layering that with the picture of the guy in the wheelchair, and then I am laying that on top of just the scene by itself with no one in it. In his book, Frances mentions Vermeer, a Dutch painter renowned for his masterly use of light in his work. Vermeer often placed his subjects near a window. Frances feels his work has become more about the quality of the light than anything else. Frances uses natural light and shies away from articial lighting. I am interested in capturing the atmosphere and the effects of nature. Whether its time passing or weather changing or seeing how light plays off of different surfaces, I think articial lighting destroys that, he said. Similarly to layering different people from the same place, Frances layers images from the same place but with different light exposure into the nal image: In my case, my camera is on a tripod; it does not move. I am taking multiple images of the same scene. Because the contrast is so high, the sky is 50 times brighter than the shadow: one exposure for the sky, another for the shadow, another exposure for the midtones. While a ne arts painter creates the nal image captured in his mind out of different aspects he has seen, the digital photographer takes images of his object with a multitude of light exposures and creates the nal image through working with the software. After walking with the designer or architect around the site and discussing what is important or not, Frances may spend a whole day there observing the place: I think spaces do have their best time; they have their own spirit. Some are clearly quiet and meditative and soft and natural, and those should be shot during a very soft daylight. Some are very bold and energising, and maybe that is an appropriate space of strong contrasts and shafts of lights coming in. Since I dont supplement light anymore, what I try to do is control the time of day. I choose to shoot a room and where the light comes from, Frances continues. Frances uses the means available in the place itself to direct the light, for example by covering some windows: I force the light to come from certain places and never from the front, never from behind, always from the background or from the side because it gives the most dimension and shape to objects. Although Frances determines everything the brightness, the composition, and whats in an image he gives the viewer the feeling of being free: The viewer will look at it and feel free to walk into, and wander around in, and choose things to look at. Now, the truth is I am really forcing him to look at things, but thats not the experience one has; the experience is not being forced. The experience is maybe seduced a little bit, but I think they [the images] are gentle. There is no hammer on the head. As one looks closer at favourite images, one notices the perfectness of everything, which is achieved by complete attention to details: the way a candle holder is situated, placed off centre on the table, teasing you, but actually in perfect harmony within the complete, orchestrated image. One notices the way clouds cradle an open space between two architectural structures and the way a dog adds balance and warmth. The placement of people has the same perfection. Because of this perfectness, you are further uplifted into a bit of doubt: you wonder how true the images are. Photography on lm goes back to the early 1900s. It seems Frances was freed from the bondage of lm when digital came along. In his book, he calls digital photography the perfect medium. He says his images are more realistic than what a traditional camera could produce: If you did an exposure of a sunny day, the building had a bolt of light going through it. You could either expose for the shadow and the bolt of light would be just burned out or you exposed for the bolt of light and get a beautiful texture on the stone. The shadows were black. There was no information. The photographer who took the picture, however, saw what was in the shadows, what was in the highlights but the lm couldnt reproduce that. Film was an incredibly narrow view; it was really constricting. It was

very far from the truth. It was nothing [like] what that photographer saw. He saw everything, Frances said. With Frances, we start to understand that a true image is the one that tells the most detailed story and is the closest to what a human eye can see. It is the one in the artists mind, the one Frances aims at producing as his nal image. Even if you belong to the school of thought that considers a true image one that was captured in camera, you absolutely can get along with digital photography. Frances catches a series of moments in succession in camera and includes or omits certain things from that series of exposures. He doesnt add anything that was not there. If a man was walking through the space, he was there, and then he moved. His movement can be shown in a blurred image. Francess images almost work as a video or as moving pictures (as once called), except that they are all captured in one image the conclusion and collaboration of a collection of images. Frances shows us that a great image is no longer based on the idea of capturing an object in camera. Actually, not even these great photographers, famous for their images, relied only on the camera. Look at Ansel Adams! Frances said. There are a lot of pictures of parks and nature out there, but the prints are incredible. He has taken his prints, and he learned how to mix the chemicals and to get a piece of lm that the guy down the block can only get six stops out of, [with] Ansel Adams getting 16 stops out of it. So there was that much more information. And then he was going to the dark room and printing it. And he is dodging and burning and controlling the light, and again he is putting that paper into more chemicals, and those chemicals are treating it in a certain way and giving a certain tonality. In the end, this guy has this print! And Photoshop is the same as that. Its the same as the great dark rooms, Frances said. Scott Frances creates quality, elegance, and beauty with his camera and the computer. As he puts it, That journey, that effort, brings me to a state of grace. And grace is a word I think is really important because even if you have nothing, if you have grace, its all you really need.

The life that imitates art

Markus Lpertz: In the divine light Gemeente Museum, The Hague
MICHAEL PARASKOS There are good reasons why the German artist Markus Lpertz, currently enjoying a major retrospective at the Gemeente Museum in the Hague, brings to mind the The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. It is not simply that since he came to prominence in the 1960s, Lpertz has bobbed up and down in popularity like the question of whether painting is still relevant has popped in and out of the art worlds collective head. Its more the nagging feeling that Lpertz, like poor Reggie, has suffered a kind of mid-life crisis, resulting in a profound loss of faith in the meaning of life. The only difference is Lpertz was born with a mid-life crisis, and has lost his faith in art. This is clearly evident in his paintings from the last 50 years. They are bright, brash, and full of various textures and surfaces, which should lead to a sense of life and vitality. But they are curiously dead, as if he went through the motions of painting without any real belief in its value as an activity. The curators have cottoned on to this loss of faith, but characterise it as a series of supposedly serious questions. This includes how can we make gurative art when guration has been compromised by its association with Hitler and Stalin, and how can the human body be a subject for art when the body has been so abused in the 20th century? As my artist friend noted, no real artist ever asks a question like this, they just do what they do. The most unlikely question of all, however, is Lpertzs apparent indecision over whether he should choose to paint abstract or gurative works. Again my artist friend found the idea you have a conscious choice risible. Effectively, Lpertzs questions read like excuses not to paint, but the fact he has been so prolic suggests they are really smokescreens to explain why his paintings are not better than they are. We are supposed to think the paint handling is cack handed because the big issues of the Holocaust and Gulag inevitably overwhelmed the artist. We are supposed to look at the references to painters like Poussin, born in an age when artists had true faith, and see in Lpertz a painful nostalgia for the past. And we are supposed to see Lpertzs hacking at the surface of his paintings as evidence of someone hammering at the door of the other world of art, desperate to get in, but forever locked out. It all feels like a campaign to present Lpertz as a tragic but ultimately romantic artist, who wants to believe in the god of art, but who has been born in an age when such faith is impossible. With that, the feeling on leaving the exhibition is not a good one as you feel slightly used. People who are satised with the surface pattern making of painters such as Peter Doig or Chris Oli will probably be happy with the way Lpertz has slapped the paint around his canvases. But really there is something not quite right at the heart of this work, and the experience of them is not a pleasant one. Michael Paraskos is a writer living in London.

Markus Lpertz, Donald Ducks Homecoming 1963