“Sleepy time gal, when all your dancin’ is through
Sleepy time gal I’ll find a cottage for you
You’ll learn to cook and to sew
What’s more you’ll love it I know
When you’re a stay-at-home , play-at-home
Eight o’clock sleepy time gal.”
Last September we reported on our visit to the Andrew Wyeth studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. If you are interested in art but missed those reports, here are the Blogfinger links.
As a photographer, I always pay attention to painters because they create their own worlds while photographers capture what the lens sees. However, there are gray zones, because with digital photography and even with film–darkroom photography, the artist has an opportunity to manipulate the world that he sees.
There are various “schools” of photography that have come and gone over the years since the invention of the camera and light sensitive media. One of those insisted on stark realism without any manipulation. That was true during the golden age of photojournalism where a newspaper photographer could not stage an image or do more to it other than some minor darkroom effects, such as adjusting contrast, which would make the picture clearer.
But later, photojournalism merged into fine art photography. With attention being paid to the “fine art” image, skies were often challenging. Some photographers sought landscapes where the sky was dramatic with clouds, color and shading. If not, they did not like a plain sky, so they could “burn” the sky in the darkroom to at least give it some “color” in a black and white print. With digital photography you can achieve all sorts of effects in the sky. Bob Bowné’s imaginative photography seen regularly on Blogfinger illustrates how special digital effects can be used in modern photography.
Which brings me to Wyeth’s dry brush on paper painting called “The Mill” from 1959. If you look at the sky, you see no details and no clouds. He does give it a little color. Wyeth could have made the sky look any way, but he chose this.
So this painting has given me permission as a photographer to be satisfied with a landscape that has no detail in the sky. It’s just as well, because if all your photos have dramatic skies, then it can get boring. And in the case of this painting, Wyeth’s choice was absolutely the best one.
The Mill by Andrew Wyeth. (From a reproduction by the Brandywine River Museum)
Here is one of my photographs that illustrates the point:
Andrew Wyeth, famous painter, was a movie buff and he had souvenirs around his studio, given to him by some of his actor friends. There was a sword from the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The skeleton was real, but I don’t know if he had it there for fun or for body sketches.
We had a skeleton in the gross anatomy lab in medical school. There is a photo around somewhere with me in my smelly formaldehyde laden lab coat with my arm around the skeleton, holding a pipe in his mouth.
My roommate and I were given a bone box and a skull box to take home and study. One month later, we put a hat on the skull, lit it up, and put it in our ground floor window for Halloween on 16th Street in D.C. Down the street a few blocks was the White House where our neighbor JFK and his family lived.
LOUIS PRIMA with a song for the skeleton “I Ain’t Got No Body.” And also “Just a Gigolo.” which is about my ambition after my bar mitzvah.