Gerhard Richter is a photographer as well as painter. He is an artist that joins 2 mediums together to produce fascinating images.

He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists. He is mainly known for his paintings, however he has also produced in his life a set of photographs , which are exotic in their style. He has produced a book on those images titled “Overpainted Photographs”. These included precious photographs which were unique because of the altered affects given to them.

I find his creativity absorbing. All his images would have been perfectly fine on it’s own, without any paint added onto them, however he doesn’t stop there and has a need to create a contrast between the two mediums.

His choice of colour is almost always a contrast to the photograph, where he would choose an opposite paint colour to the print. The paint appears unplanned and the technique of creating it is unexpected. the texture of the paint is another contrast of it to the print, as it is rough and all over the place, whereas the printed photograph is smooth, glossy and polished. he creates this disturbance with paint, which also shifts the photograph to a more powerful, thrilling one.

I have wanted to experiment with this process, using images I have already taken weeks prior. These images were from my phone when I was on holiday in Spain. This is why I didn’t go through the process of planning a specific photoshoot, as I was very pleased with the ones I had already collected. I also didn’t have a great quantity of them, so I only printed out 2 different photographs. However this was just a little experimentation with this specific artistic/photographic style so I only needed a couple images to try it out.

What inspired me was the work produced by another artist Chen Po-I. :

His work are mainly landscape photographs that have been taken inside a window or building that creates a frame for the landscape. This reminded me that I have similar photographs of landscape taken inside a building, framing them. That is why I decided to mis these two artists work together by taking a photograph that looks similar to Chen Po-I’s work, but with experimentation of paint done by Gerhard Richter.

These are the photographs I have produced:

On both the photographs I have used acrylic paint which is different to Gerhard Richter as he uses oil paint for his work, I was unable to use oil paint as due to its slow drying process and limited time, I had to find a medium that will hold onto the photograph and dry fast.

I have used a palette knife and simply dragged the paint on it across the photograph. With the first image I have also painted a swirl-like line across the photograph. This was influenced by photographs by Gerhard Richter, that I have looked at before applying paint to understand how his paint application works.