These painted images start out as black and white (gelatin silver) prints that I create in my darkroom. Deciding when and how to paint an image is intuitive for me–some images lend themselves to the transformations of oil paint and others don’t. I use all kinds of oil paints, not just photo oils, to create images interpreting my memory and imagination more than reality. I use cotton swabs of varying sizes instead of brushes to apply paint and remove bits of it with an art eraser to create highlights and other effects.
There’s a magic for me in applying the paints–moving them around on the image, layering them, deepening the shadows and opening the highlights. Though the images are editioned, each one is unique, and I try to make the images in an edition as similar to each other as possible.
Painting on photographs is an old tradition, and I like to think I put a modern spin on it.
