Why make hand-painted photographs?

Desert building | 5x7 inches | acrylic on photograph

Black and white photography is just about as good as it gets. There isn't another visual medium that so perfectly captures shape, form and texture in quite the same way. So why try to improve on it?

Because color makes it even better: especially when the color is under your control, and not Kodak or Fuji's. Traditional hand-coloring of black and white photographs is done with very intense, highly transparent oil paints, particularly those made by Marshall's. Traditional hand coloring is great, but it also results in a very standard image, familiar to us all from countless antique postcards.

Using artist's oil and acrylic paints and even pastels and colored pencils, it's possible to go quite a bit further in coloring and painting photographs than the old postcard photographers did. I've been painting and hand coloring black and white photographs for years, enjoying the artistic tenstion between the cool, machine-like precision of photography and the expressiveness of added color. I work with a variety of colored mediums, sometimes coloring an image only lightly and sometimes nearly painting it completely out, so the original photograph barely shows through.

Most recently I find myself using very simple and subdued colors, mostly earth tones and a blue or green, to give each photograph a subtle sense of depth. I prefer acrylic colors because of their permanence and the fact they are generally less toxic than oils, even though oils are easier to handle on the surface of a photograph.