A World of Detail in One Square Inch
Learn how Garry Kaye uses Photoshop to manipulate his photo references, meticulously rendering the landscape one tiny square at a time.
By BJ Foreman
Garry Kaye’s dense, superrealistic landscape paintings are sometimes mistaken for photographs. On the other hand, photographers sometimes say that his paintings, which can seem like the work of a photorealist, actually depict a reality beyond what the mere camera can record. Like many painters since the day of Leonardo da Vinci, Kaye does indeed employ photographic means in his process. But, make no mistake about it, his paintings are painted, and painted, and painted. In fact, it takes Kaye an average of four to six months to finish a 3×4-foot painting. As for the photographic quotient, he goes about it in a most contemporary way — with Adobe’s Photoshop program.
Just Outside His Window
Kaye studied sculpture and drawing at university. After graduation he worked as a sculptor for a while. Then he turned to farming and gardening on the family homestead on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia — and painted for pleasure. Nearly a decade ago, Kaye began to get more serious about his art. His initial work was impressionistic, but as he continued to paint, detail took over. His subject matter is the landscape of his childhood, much of it observed from his living room window. It features nature in the vibrant, glinting colors of bright sunlight.
“Most of what I paint is right outside my window,” the artist explains. “I know it very well, and I can see it.” Seeing is just the jumping off point for Kaye, though. His acrylic landscapes often show a forest scene, with a pond or shoreline near the middle of the painting. A thicket or a dense grove of trees is reflected as a mirror image in the water. It’s in these spaces that the paintings exhibit their super-reality, as the details seem quadrupled. Viewing a painting is almost like using the electronic super-zoom feature on some state-of-the-art computer or tablet; this, in fact, is what Kaye is using to produce the effect.
On His Computer Monitor
To create that effect, Kaye turns to Adobe Photoshop, a graphics-editing program. He zooms in on his digital images so that a 2-inch square fills the computer screen. “This isn’t just about what my eye sees,” says Kaye. “It’s about how the camera views the elements in the scene.”
This ability to enlarge tiny details on the computer allows Kaye to inject the superrealism his paintings exhibit. “Viewers point out how much detail is in the work, how much information,” he explains.
“That’s what they relate to. A simple apple leaf that might look green takes on purples or violets. Or it may have a bright pink or blue ‘aura.’ It’s this level of detail that I try to capture.”
Finding the Photo
Kaye’s creative process begins with the camera. He spends a great deal of time taking photos, mostly during the months of October and November. “Summer is just too green. We live in a sea of blue and green and, this time of the year, there are mauves and pinks, too,” he says, speaking about temperate Salt Spring in the fall.
Next comes a lengthy culling process to decide on one particular photo. “It takes me a long time to choose the right one,” says Kaye, “as I’m going to be working with it for months.” His wife, Bly, a collage artist whom he met in art school, aids him in the selection process.
Adjusting the Image
The chosen photo is then loaded into Photoshop, which he uses “to isolate and magnify specific areas to see what the camera has captured, because there’s a sea of detail.” At this point Kaye manipulates the digital image — “not too much, sometimes cropping the photo, but usually just adjusting contrast and brightness” — and tailors the image to reflect what he’s after. “Then,” says Kaye, “I print the image on numerous 8×10 sheets that I hang up and refer to later when I’m painting in the detail.”
Blurring for Color
Technology intervenes again in this stage as Kaye uses Photoshop’s Blur tool (found on the Photoshop toolbar) to go back and adjust the entire digital image, editing out some of the detail — including an occasional telephone pole or line. This method helps him get an initial quick and simplified view so that he can focus on the color he wants for the background.
Next, he begins the actual painting process, using as a guide a unique cardboard and string grid-tool he designed and created to break the can- vas into smaller parts that correspond to Photoshop’s electronic grid (see “On the Grid” below). First, he covers the entire canvas with two or three layers of paint, using a large brush. Focusing on the back- ground, he builds up the color with very little detail, starting from the top left and working across and down the painting. “This establishes my palette,” says Kaye, “and enables me to see the color combinations that, I hope, will make the painting come alive.”
Zooming in for Detail
After he establishes the colors in the background, Kaye very loosely roughs in the details from background to foreground, including the positions of elements like trees, branches, and leaves. The next and most tedious step of the process is adding more and more selected detail, painstakingly, one square inch at a time, with the help of his grid-tool.
At this stage Kaye refers both to one of the 8×10 photocopied sheets of his original digital image and to the greatly magnified photographic information from each separate electronic grid on his computer monitor. He uses Photoshop’s Zoom tool to enlarge areas on his monitor to the degree that “auras,” or multiple colors, appear in the leaves and branches. It’s these aura details that he paints in “colors we don’t see in the image with the naked eye.”
Using his handmade grid-tool to orient his brushstrokes on the canvas, Kaye completes a 6-inch square every two or three days. Sometimes this can be a grind. “There are low times when I feel I’ll never finish,” he says, “and it can be quite dispiriting. The grid works well for me, as it helps me focus on the smaller picture and keeps me from getting too discouraged.” In this way, he can complete two or three works a year. Photoshop technology enables Kaye and his wife to head south in December for their annual three-month working vacation in Mexico, where he finishes his paintings.
Photographic Aberrations
The key to experiencing Kaye’s paintings is noticing his use of photographic aberrations near the center of each one. In Frost in the Lower Field, there’s a chaotic patch of white frost close to the center of the painting. This patch of frost reads as a blur compared to the detail of the rest of the painting — and a counterpoint to the sharp image of the lone dead fruit still hanging on the tree. The bright glare of light can be read much as we would see it in an overexposed photo.This element creates an energy within the static landscape in Kaye’s work.
“I feel as if I treat the painting like a sculpture,” the former sculptor says. “I’m a 3-D person. I want people to feel as if they can go in behind the trees I paint and enter the landscape.”
Kaye wants us to get up close and personal with his paintings. “I paint with my nose an inch away from the canvas. That’s how I want people to see my work, too,” he says. “You need the detail; you need to be up close because I use a load of color. When you stand back, you don’t see it. When you get close, the painting becomes a different journey. I like to have a painting look good from 20 feet away, then have viewers get their noses up to it and discover even more.”
On the Grid
Having received no formal training as a painter, Kaye devised and built his own grid system to help him get the effects he desires. This cardboard-and-string grid, measuring 6 inches square (Image A), further divides the canvas into 1×1-inch squares. The grid is sometimes attached to a hook that goes over the top of the canvas and moves on a hinge, allowing the grid to flip up and down. In Image A, Kaye is using his handmade grid to orient his brushstrokes in his detail work.
Using Photoshop’s Zoom tool, he enlarges each area of the digital image where he wants extreme detail, to the point that what he calls “auras” appear. He selects the most vibrant colors he sees to enhance the details. Image B shows a 6×6-inch crop of one of his magnified digital images, revealing the auras he paints.
In Image C, we see both one of Kaye’s photocopies and his grid-tool positioned on his painting in progress. Kaye views a minute, magnified portion of his photographic reference through Photoshop’s electronic grid on his monitor for detail color, and he refers to a 8×10-inch photocopy of each relative area of the image for the detail elements. He approaches his canvas in very small increments using his grid-tool. “Each 1-inch square is intriguing to me,” he says. “Each is a little painting in itself, but I have to match each square up with the next little square.”
Art Imitating Photography Imitating the Landscape
Kaye says his challenge with Apple Tree was to create depth when using predominant greens. “I attempted to do this by using warm greens in the foreground, offset by colors leaning to the cooler side for the background.”
This painting, when viewed from a distance, looks quite photographic, and the largest green apple on the tree starts to look like a stop-action frame of a ball moving away from the viewer. Yet, when examined up close, the piece reveals the painter’s actual abstract craft. “My objective was to paint the apples so they looked as though they might fall from the painting if bumped.” He renders this vibrating aspect — created by the “aura” revealed by using Photoshop’s Zoom tool — in the built-up layers of color he paints (Detail A).
Kaye carefully selects colors for painting the aura around leaves and branches (Detail B). “It’s impossible for me to paint all of the colors,” he says. “But I try to use those I feel are most vibrant.”
BJ Foreman is an art critic and small business owner in Cincinnati, Ohio.
A version of this article originally appeared in Acrylic Artist.
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