Art dealer Edward Winkleman profiles Tracy Nakayama’s watercolor copies of sex photos in his artist of the week blog post.
Looking at this work, it occurs to me that the visual system is always fooled into regarding a realistically painted image as a work from life. This is part of the magic of art, and it works even if one knows that the picture is a copy of a photo. The simplicity of the art technique, combined with the technology of photography, overrides cognitive knowledge and confuses visual perception.
Would Nakayama’s work be stronger or weaker if, in place of paintings, she made photo collages from her primary source material? Do we need painting as a veil for photography, when the photos become sexually explicit?
I think, in this case, the fairly stark paintings point the viewer to the emphasis which the artist wanted to create — if the images were photographs, the photo-artist would have needed to use Photoshop to remove or blur non-essential elements [as determined by the photo-artist] in order to create a similar effect. I’m not sure why, but for me I like the paintings and see them as unique — photos would have been ‘interesting’ but common.
It is not just painting but painting with water colors that provides the softness to offset sexual explicit nature.