Early this year my friend Sara Hartman went to Africa for a photo safari. I attended her presentation when she came back, and her photograph she had titled Sausage Tree stayed with me. It had a painting in it. I asked her for permission to use it as a motif. Here is her original photograph:
And here is the resulting painting:
I changed the composition somewhat. I moved the mountain (because I can do that). I also stretched the tree and made it taller. I actually didn’t intend that, but it worked out that way. I think I got the feeling of the open savannah. The painting looks better when you don’t see the original photograph right next to it. But that is always that way when you take photographs as motifs. The painting becomes something different altogether.
This is the first painting I actually started and finished in 2019. Hopefully it breaks my creative logjam. Nothing much has been coming out of the Haupt studio lately.
Well here is something: Behold the Sausage Tree.
When hiking I frequently experience scenes that I wish I could capture visually the way I am experiencing them. The camera, with its technical limitations can’t ignore the things my mind isn’t focusing on. In those moments, I wish I were a painter.
Just remember, maybe one in a hundred photographs ever make it into a start on a canvas. Then, maybe one in ten starts on a canvas actually become a finished painting, at least that’s my track record. Lots of “creative agony” in the middle there, but that’s what it’s all about. I guess I am a painter.
I like everything about your painting that is different from the photograph. You are an artist.
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