A blurred image painting by German artist Gerhard Richter went on sale a year ago at Sotheby’s auction house. Collectors and art lovers raved about Richter’s unusual technique. The winning bid was an astonishing $46.3 million.
Richmond artist John E. Shenk also creates blurred image paintings. Radically different from Richter’s almost crude technique of smearing paint across a photograph with a squeegee or a piece of wood, Shenk’s technique utilizes sophisticated computer technology as a bridge between photography and paintings.
“The computer is essential to me in turning photographs into painting ideas,” says Shenk, a Virginia Commonwealth University fine arts graduate and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts grant recipient. “It is very much a vehicle for what used to be called studies and drawings by painters in the past. To me, photos are digital drawings at the service of painting ideas.
“When I compose a photo, it is with the eye of the painter. It’s very natural for me,” he explains. “I care about the composition, which is always at the service of my paintings.
“And since I’m a technology expert, I can manipulate colors in my photographs on the computer, add shadows or intensify light. But the right composition is always there first.”
While Shenk has been recognized over the past decade for his larger-than-life close-up portraits of many of Richmond’s most prominent families, he has been absent from the local public art scene. With what he calls his “Come Back Show” at Hill Gallery, a different side of this private, intellectual painter and his slightly mysterious, idiosyncratic images will be displayed. Shenk’s 36-by-24-inch paintings sell for $1,500 to $2,500.
The first encounter with a John Shenk painting usually raises the question: “How does he do this?”
Explaining that his paintings are based on photographs that serve as drawings is a partial answer.
After deciding that a photograph’s composition is good enough to become a painting, Shenk uses a grid technique that he developed to apply acrylic paint to canvas. His strokes are evocative of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and John Singer Sargent, artists he cites as influencing his work.
While the composition is usually both complex and unexpected, Shenk’s application of paint is almost flawless.
Sometimes an image is from a computer-rescued old photo that Shenk had thought not “good enough,” but kept because of its composition or for sentimental reasons. As computer technology improved, he was then able to use retouching techniques in Photoshop to enhance, manipulate or draw out the painterly aspects of the image.
“In this way I transformed the older photographs into viable painting ideas,” he says.
Although Shenk’s paintings are usually figurative, they are much more than regular portraits. Each work conveys a feeling, a personal touch and an impact. Knowing or caring about the person painted, Shenk says, helps shape the images in an intimate way, as well.
Shenk’s paintings invite the viewer to pause, recognizing on some level that they’re seeing something different. This is not only because of the unexpected blurred image.
“It’s partly the smooth surface,” Shenk says, “how I apply the paint.”
But it’s also because Shenk invariably includes “an extra thing” in his paintings, something that helps support the figure and transports both the work and the viewer out of the mundane.
This unexpected “something” gives an enigmatic quality to each painting, creating a synergetic presence that makes the viewer want to stay and examine the work more closely.
In “Ralph,” for example, an African-American man stands with outstretched arms in front of a barely visible sign labeled Outlaw. The word on the sign transforms the painting, creating questions in the viewer’s mind.
In “Beach Egress,” the viewer sees the back of a man as he walks past bicycles parked along fences on both sides. In the center foreground, a large yellow object anchors both the walker and the bicycles in an unexpected balanced manner.
Paintings titled “About Charlottesville” feature a man dressed in blue in different settings. In the background of one, a dark shadow seems almost painted on a wall. Is it the man’s shadow? It’s hard to be certain. We’re forced to look closer.
The same thing happens with the painting where a row of identical white buildings forms the background. But what are they exactly? And why is the man standing in that spot?
Partly because Shenk uses a complicated technique that results in blurred paintings, all of his work ultimately leaves us with strangely satisfying — though unanswered — questions and images remembered for a long time.
This is exceptional work that honors the gifts of impressionism and takes advantage of its postmodern position in technology. It also raises the ever-inflammatory issue of the value of a given piece of art.
Now about that $46 million …
Resource: http://www.richmond.com
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