Today, I’m sharing the works of the unfortunately little-known Véronique du Boisrouvray, a self-taught French artist who discovered pastels and the talent to create such masterpieces.
On one hand, the meticulous and precise transfer of an image from a photo to paper in any medium, in my value system, belongs to a separate category from drawing from life or imagination. But within this separate category, for me, there are those who amaze and all the rest.
I’m still learning, but I’ve made some conclusions about drawing from photos, and honestly, they were quite a revelation. Not every good photograph, as they say, “translates to canvas,” especially if you’re not yet skilled enough to mentally apply the necessary “filters” on the fly. In photos, we don’t pay attention to contrast, but for an artist, it’s important. So, a photo with clear contrast works better. A photograph, by definition, has a narrower dynamic range than our eyes, and both dark and light areas will lack detail. When details are missing, the brain fills them in. But in a painting, this mental filling-in may not occur for various reasons: the painting is larger, more detached from the real world, etc. And for that filling-in
Therefore, for professional artists, photography is an additional, not a primary reference. And most importantly, a camera captures everything at once, whereas human eyes in the real world only focus on a very small part of the image, and everything else is like a blur. A photo artist uses bokeh for the same purpose, something modern phones can’t handle well due to the laws of physics: the lens needs to be larger.
Well, let’s go look at the paintings of Véronique du Boisrouvray.
I remind you that similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes” section, you can find all 76 (unlike Facebook, which neglects almost half).
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 