In the Process of researching and acquiring photography equipment for another project I discovered many job-lots of 20th century photographs for sale. Pictured some of the first batch, brought which came from there family of origin who were in the process of downsizing and had digitized there old photos so decided to dispose of originals. The family kindly granted me permission to use them in this project. They are a small but interesting collection as despite the era (1930-50s) the family had traveled extensively. From my understanding they had been working in some way for the British government and visited locations all over the world.
The first painting of the project was based from a 1952 photo from this collection of a gentlemen peering over the side of a large ship hunting for icebergs. It’s slightly overexposed and I do not know the where location it was taken.
My initial aims with this was to simplify the scene to a means to create a basic composition, as you can see the figure was a struggle. It was an interesting debate of how best to put forward the colour, as the photo is black and white with slight sepia fading it is likely the ship was probably white or grey depending if military or civilian vessel. It was already becoming a debate as to how best to work with these archive items, more too follow.
Chris Corish Art 