Water Photography from a Painter’s Viewpoint

Leonardo. Vol. 15. No. 4, pp. 302-303. 1982 Printed in Great Britain 0024-094X/82/040302-02%03.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd. WATER PHOTOGRAPHY FROM A PAINTER’S VIEWPOINT Bill Pike* I was extremely interested to read in Leonardo Kazimierz Wejchert’s article on ‘Water Portraits’ and their use in an audiovisual programme [I], since we have both been fascinated by the same source material for a number of years. (He has taken more than 500photographs since 1961,and mine approach 1000 since 1972.) It was when I travelled down the coast of Norway in summertime in 1972, that I became mesmerized by constantly changing fjord reflections as they appeared immediately in front of our steamer’s bow wave. I realised that there were optimum visual moments in nature and decided to capture those reflections in colour slides and, eventually, by paintings derived from selected transparencies. A water surface is a sensitive monitor for ephemeral motion and colour; it is. therefore, an ideal subject to be photographed. I use a single-lens reflex camera for convenience and hugely enjoy the ‘out of body’ experience given to the eye by a telephoto-zoom lens, since its variable viewpoint allows great compositional freedom to me as an artist. In spiteof the number of photographs taken, I feel stress should be placed on the creative aspect of what is done with the photos after they are taken. Having been employed as an observer in the British Meteorological Office for 6 years until 1972, I possess knowledge of weather that has helped me take advantage of chance situations, an important creative realization. The painting entitled ‘Memory’ (Fig. 1) is derived from a colour slide depicting the first few large drops of rain splashingintothe calm Bayou St. John in New Orleans just at the moment when a thunderstorm, developing over Lake Ponchartrain to the north, broke over the city. Before rain began the water surface was simply a mirror, and, immediately after I took the photograph, torrents of rain would have confused my image and dimmed the distant light. There was only one ‘right’ time to take the photograph, and my painting is an attempt to capture that moment. A special day-hike was necessary to take good source photographs needed to unravel the next water topic. I was fascinated by an ever-changing, complex beauty of vortex Fig. 1. ‘Memory’,o h on cunvas, 1.33 x 2.31 m, 1981. *Artist, 19 lnholmes Common, Woodlands St Mary, Newbury. Berkshire RG16 7SX, England. (Received 5 April 1982.) 302 Water Photography from a Painter’s Viewpoint 303 Fig. 2. ‘Skookumchuk’.oils on canvas, 1.22 x 1.68 m. 1981. chains in the Skookumchuk tide race in British Columbia, Canada. (Skookumchuk is a native Indian word literally meaning fast water.) Once understood, I attempted to recreate that beauty in a painting (Fig. 2), which is a juxtaposition of selectively built up lines in grey and white impasto, next to areas of translucent dark blue oil paint, effecting the fast movement above. Upwelling in the foreground, which effectively slows the flow, is rendered differently using evenly applied areas of lowcontrast colour, modelled to eliminate sharp edges. A small chain of vortices in the right foreground occurs on the boundary between two areas of upwelling. To date, I have completed about 60 paintings of water and I hope to make 100. Reference 1. K. Wejchert, Water Portraits, Leonurdo 14, 216 (1981). ...