[Steven Sweeney]

You're right, it's a contentious issue, unresolvable here or in any other forum. You've expressed your preferences and there's absolutely no reason why you can't or shouldn't work according to those preferences, no matter what anyone else says or does in their own practice. The gracious turnabout that some practitioners won't embrace is that other very dedicated, skillful, enthusiastic, and honourable practitioners use different methods.

I was fortunate to learn to draw and paint from life, without having relied upon photos or gridding, but there's a footnote here that has to be told. I ALWAYS had to do a charcoal drawing first, of anything I was thinking of rendering in oils, and this included portraits as well as still-life. After all the "hard work" -- the most correct placement and drawing of everything that I could accomplish -- was done, to such a degree of finish that I could proudly show the charcoal to anyone [and indeed I used to exhibit these charcoals alongside the paintings], I didn't just start over and re-draw everything on canvas. I did as I was trained to do in a "classical realist" atelier: I placed a sheet of acetate over my drawing, traced the contours, and then transferred them with graphite paper to my stretched canvas. Where's the "cheating"? I'd already done the measuring, the sighting, the drawing, once. Why, for the sake of purists' imprimatur, engage in redundant and repetitive work re-drawing it on the canvas?

But, yes, it's a bit of a stickier wicket, isn't it, to project a photo onto a canvas and trace the contours. That's faster and easier than gridding, which is faster and easier than marking off major divisions and filling in the bits, which is faster and easier than just having a go at drawing someone or something without any mechanical aids.

We all work within the limits of our time, and our talents. My best work is from life, and some of my least satisfying work is from photographs. But I have some pretty darn nice pieces from photos, too. I was recently on a tour bus in southern Taiwan and I saw a colourful oxcart sitting near the entrance (frequented infrequently by tourists) to a locally famous coastal sand dune area, and I instantly thought, there's a painting, and I lifted my camera and brought home only that image. I've painted it now, and though I'm not completely happy with it or how it came about, it was recently shown with a series of other "Taiwan influenced" paintings, and this particular piece was singled out by a Taiwanese-born Chinese woman as the one that most evoked, for her, a native Taiwan scene. "That," she said emphatically, "that is Taiwan." And that, I'm noting for the benefit of this discussion, is the only one of the pieces that showed a painting done by reference to a photograph.

We all have our own work to do, and our own sensibilities and preferences. My own take on the protocol is that as soon as someone tells me that I'm cheating, or doing it wrong, or not doing "fine" or "good" art, I find it beneficial to try to omit that person from my circle of counselors. Most of the critics of the way I work aren't even working artists, I find; they're failed artists, or disenchanted former artists, or collectors of what they like, or just folks with an attitude that they learned from reading other folks' opinions. I'm doing the best I can, ALL the time, with my time and talent and circumstances -- some of which aren't where I'd like them to be. And sometimes that means drawing from life, sometimes gridding up from a photo, and yes, the god of arts forgive me, sometimes projecting something, just so I can get on with what I love to do, which is painting. Believe me, it's a LOT harder to paint a really good painting from a photo reference than most people imagine. Because I've done the boot camp of drawing and painting, I can perhaps make the most of a photo. The real hazard is in slavishly copying one, or gridding up from or tracing one, without having been inquisitive and disciplined enough to know what things and people look like away from the lens as well as processed through one.

There's room for all of us. Not everyone likes that -- but so what? We're all here to stay, whoever likes it or not, if we're committed and conscientious enough about it.

Steven