Cameras and Art

I just received a question about the Burton Silverman slide presentation at the Portrait Society of America conference I recently attended. Linda H has asked what else he had to say about the use of cameras.

In general Mr. Silverman was showing slides of artwork and the photo references used in the creation of art. It illustrates to artists that photo references are a good source of information, but one must be careful not to be led wrong by photos, since they distort what the eye is actually seeing sometimes. He also made comment on the David Hockney theory that lenses have been used throughtout art history to make art, ie. Vermeer projecting his images onto the canvas or Inges using camera obscura to do his wonderful drawings. In essence Hockney used this theory
to ok and justify projecting images onto canvas rather than taking the time to learn to actually draw. I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Silverman's view that this is rubbish. Why bother to create art if you aren't going to learn to draw. You could just as easily buy a coloring book and some crayola crayons.

We also saw numerous examples of artists creating works which were so wonderfully executed that one would think they were photography and yet they were not in any way created with lenses.