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Figure Squatting by Pool, 2006, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle |
Introducing digital imagery to painting leads to dead ends and open doors.
To simply generate images on a computer as the basis of paintings offers dubious means to communicate with a viewer. The thrill comes when the computer image and oil paint blend into the unexpected.
For some artists, using a computer to paint would seem a dreadful punishment. At times, it is for me: it does not make painting easier, sometimes leading to failure and dead ends. But manipulating images on a computer generates the unpredictable by introducing the random, like throwing a bowling ball into a crysal boutique.
My relation with the computer became confusing as I continued to use it as a starting point for paintings. Rather than steadying or entrenching my perspective or style, it continues to widen it.
The computer tears subjects up like a tree shredder, leaving both artist and viewer to patch them back together. Applied as a sketchbook, the computer’s perceptions change our own.
One can legitimately claim that I preplan paintings—even down to individual brushstrokes on occasion—on the computer. I paint backwards, composing much of painting and working out some of its problems before hitting the canvas.
Distorting images on a computer helps me see the essentials of a subject more clearly, its twisting and spindling of an image dispelling preconceptions about how to depict a subject or feeling. One sets aside centuries of art tradition by doing so.
Planning the Improbable: Process of Creating a Painting
I begin a painting with digital photographs from a promiscuous array of sources: friends that model for me, jpegs emailed from friends, images of masterpieces, live web cams, combined and composed on a computer screen.
I distort the digital photograph with an image manipulation program called Adobe Photoshop. There is no single button on the computer to press to create the image but a series of steps to explore, to disregard and to try differently. While keeping the properties of paint in mind, I aim for an unfamiliar place to paint from, a place I would not have reached on my own.
When I’ve reached an image that I’m interested in painting, I start drawing on the canvas from the computer screen.
Am I cheating by using a computer? Try it yourself some time. If you don’t find conventional painting as easy as buttering toast, you’ll find this approach impossible. Brilliance is essential and bragging if you demonstrate it won’t hurt a fly.
A Rigid Upbringing: Early Experiments
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An early painting, Portrait of a Woman, 2000, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle |
My early paintings were rigid patterns of squares or rectangles, partly inspired by New York painter Chuck Close. But while Chuck Close worked from a photo print visually broken up by overlaying a transparent grid, I started with grids or pixels on the computer, as seen in “Face of a Woman.”
I was by disappointed the flatness of rigid square and rectangle pixelation, which was too similar to the needlepoints that my grandmother would stitch and a familiar pattern to anyone who had magnified a digital image.
I began explore shapes that were less rigid, as seen in the “Suspended Figure” and “Torso.” Ribbons of the paint suggest the contours of the figure. Suggestive of the exoskeleton of an insect or of an armored samurai.
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Torso, 2001, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle |
But I felt lost. I experienced a sinking feeling that one can’t really connect the two platforms of painting and computer in meaningful way beyond using the computer as BAU in painting, business as usual.
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I couldn’t return to traditional sketching media such as graphite on paper, in which the black outline on a white background had defined representational art for millennia. Miss Thang, that’s so five centuries ago.
But I knew that I had stumbled upon a new means of representation by using computer and canvas where painting’s conventions no longer applied. If only I were a visual genius.
Oh yeah. That’s right, I am.
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Travis with Mirror, 2004, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle |
Dynamic Supermodels
I drifted away from contouring bodily shapes with the computer and realized the opposite approach of juxtaposing odd digital shapes created dynamic, irresolvable images.
Through tightly wound or improbable shapes to depict subjects, the resultant painting seemingly radiates a perpetual motion, propelled by the eye’s endless effort to solve or resolve the painting’s contradictions.
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Much of my work is inspired by the models that I work with, by their appearance, body language and sometimes by their personal stories, including Travis, a minor league baseball player whom I photographed a couple of years ago and consequently became the subject of a number of larger paintings.
Other models included Pat, a Filipina-American woman, and Nicolo, an African-Italian young man who endearingly declared upon first seeing my work, “è stupendo!” and modeled for photographs before returning to school in Italy.
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Manipulating Traditions: Tributes to Old Masters and Occasional Portraits
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David and Goliath after Carravagio, 2004, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle |
It was a jolt to the art world when British painter David Hockney claimed that the seventeenth century painter Caravaggio covertly employed a lens or a convex mirror to project the image of his subject directly onto canvas as the basis for his paintings.
Perhaps this partly explains of my perennial fascination with Caravaggio’s masterpieces; they deliver an unprecedented, almost photographic fidelity to the human form through what was a novel visual technology in the seventeenth century. Since childhood, I had been astounded by Caravaggio’s almost photographic rendition of the human form and dumbfounded by the revolution he luanched.
In my naïve tributes to Caravaggio, I enjoyed the luxury of applying current visual technology to painting in a more open way than Caravaggio was afforded, and became comfortable with criticisms that I lacked spontaneity in my approach to painting and cheated by using a computer.
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Perhaps they are accurate criticisms, or perhaps the model of what a painter is has changed in my case. The computer has become another way of exploring painting and I use it candidly; an artist is better suited to sharing openly rather than to hiding techniques as if they were trade secrets as Caravaggio undoubtedly did with his lens or mirror.
I’m now seeing other rising painters using computers covertly. Don’t worry, I won’t name names. There is nothing wrong with it except that they use the computer’s visual programs predictably, taking approached that I rejected ten years ago as to predictable.
Some visual program "filters" (software elements applied to photographs to change their appearance) are elegant sources of imagery, but they can’t replace visual invention. What had seemed genius time will reveal as too closely guided by off-the-shelf computer programs.
An Antiquated Craft: Portraits
Though a seemingly antiquated exercise, I join Warhol and Close in reviving the challenge of capturing individual likenesses. Paradoxically, digitally distorting the photograph an individual’s faces helps me see the essence of likeness more clearly, perhaps through the computer’s facility to dissolve the nonessential features of a face.
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Peter, 2006, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle |
That Split Second: Recent Works
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Figure Climbing out of Water, 2007, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle |
Occasionally individuals associate my work with deconstructionism, a concept that more accurately applied to language than to images. Perhaps I’m a sympathizer of deconstructionism, since one can interpret my works as meditations on direct experience rather than on explorations of meanings or concepts.
That is, my paintings often don’t say or signify anything any more than instrumental music does.
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Male Figure by Window, 2007, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle |
For me, many of my works suggest the split second before one completely comprehends an image. Perhaps my paintings are more of a blurring of time than of image.
Get Lost: Going Forward
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Men with Tapers , 2007, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle |
One of the difficulties that a painter faces in continuing to evolve is compounded by the painter’ own productivity. Taking on a fresh approach requires setting aside one’s previously completed work and putting oneself in a position of simply not knowing what to do.
It forces one back to reinventing painting from the fundamentals and learning new rules rather than self-cannibalizing by repeating previous successes. "Style" often becomes a foxhole for lesser artists and a missile silo for the bigger artists.
I’m starting a commission for a New York client in an unfamiliar format for me, the triptych. While using multiple panels to create a composition is a familiar motif in the weig hty religious painting in the west, one can associate it with more poetic, stark east Asian screen painting.
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Bamboo at Sunrise (diptych), 2007, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle |
These compositions works both as individual panels and as a whole, and I’m struck by some of the Chinese ink painters of the Tang and Yuan dynasties, who painted on silk or paper; such indelible surfaces provide only one chance for the correct brush stroke.
Chinese masters could construct a figure or a landscape with just a few deliberate strokes of ink while at the same time creating dynamic compositions. This underscores the lesson that less is more, and that one must set get out of the way of the painting process as if it were a truck determined to catch you in the small of the back.
I didn’t know painting would take me to such places, places I had never planned or imagined.
Portfolio of Galleries
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GalleryZ Collection |
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Ricco Renzo Gallery Collection |
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Esteban Sabar Gallery Collection |
Themes, the second set, shows the same paintings by subject matter:
Portfolio of Themes
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Landscape and Botanical Painting |
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Figurative (Model) Painting |
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Spiritual & Mythological Painting |
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Portrait Painting |
