Announcing Ask Wednesday: Ken Marks on Digital Painting

Click to enlarge
and see the painterly effects

Ask Wednesday will regularly feature an interview with an interesting person on an interesting topic.

Ken's Photo Treasures have long been a treasured sidebar feature of Moristotle. A click on the photo displayed under that heading in the sidebar takes you to Ken Marks's photostream at Flickr.com.     Well, Ken has recently broadened his photographic interests to include painting—filtering a photograph's pixels digitally. One section of his Flickr photostream features his first paintings, and the moment I saw them, I knew that I had to talk about them here. Truly, they deserve to be seen by millions. And you, because you're reading this, can be among the first hundreds to be served that dessert.
    We asked Ken about his work [Moristotle's questions are in italics]:

As you know, we sometimes use Photoshop to filter our own photographs, and we frequently display the result on Moristotle. And some of them we really like. But we remember your telling us, only a couple of months ago, that you didn't think Photoshops filters were that great. Did your attitude about the use of filters have to change for your work on the paintings?
    I've always been willing to use filters, and Photoshop has some good ones. It's just that their "Artistic" filters leave a lot to be desired. I've been on the lookout for art filters from another party that I can plug into Photoshop.

What is it about the software you're now using that distinguishes it from Photoshop?
    I'm using a plug-in called Snap Art 3. It's made by a firm named Alien Skin. It produces painterly effects without undesirable side-effects; it's like good medicine versus bad medicine. Photoshop's art filters generally give me a little that I like and a lot that's ugly.

Could you tell us what you shoot for in photography, and are you shooting for something different, or simply more, when you paint from a photograph?
    It's all "impressionism." (It strikes me as bizarre that there is a school of painting called Impressionism when everything the eye can capture or reproduce is impressionism.) When I'm "impressed" by a configuration of lines, textures, and colors that produce a beautiful harmony, I want to take a picture of it. When I want to paint from a photograph, I look for a pleasing impression that has a special property: it can mutate into another pleasing impression. It's like a lovely woman who has a lovely cousin.

Yes, but how can you tell whether a photograph has that "special property"?
    I begin by recalling a photograph that's one of my favorites. Then I try to see it in my mind's eye as a painting. It will be softer, because the hand can't match the rigor of the lens. Lines will blur and waver. Colors will pool into aggregates. New textures will emerge. Its beauty may weaken, or it may transform itself into a different beauty, just as powerful. The latter is the "special property." If I can imagine it, I'll run the software to see if it's really there.

Please select one of your recent paintings and talk about its creation.
    One would be the hydrangea impasto.

Click to enlarge and see the painterly effects

The areas of color in the original seem to be related as the adjacent bands of color in a rainbow are related. I wondered how the photo would look if those areas were more independent, an effect that impasto offers. So I chose the impasto effect and manipulated the paint thickness, photorealism, and color variation sliders (and a few others less so) until I saw a result I liked.

Is there a painting among the set that you're not completely satisfied with? Why not?
    Well, the rendering of the Graslei in oils would be one.

Click to enlarge and see the painterly effects

I'd like to take the photorealism back another notch, but each time I find a way to do this, something else changes that makes it a bad bargain.

Any advice for other digital photographers when it comes to painting from photographs?
    Yes. Don't settle for filters that give you less than complete satisfaction.

You can see all of Ken's latest paintings here at Flickr.com.