There are a lot of people that paint from photographs. It’s a little odd because they inadvertently capture some of the way of abstractions in seeing that a camera creates. For example: the tonal range, the cyan blue which isn’t quite the range of blues in nature, depth of field, etc…There is quite a difference from paintings that are a product of two human eyes and a real time confrontation with a 3D subject. For example, a landscape painters will quickly realize how quickly the sun moves and the nature of the light changes when you are trying to catch it on a big canvas…Monet would revisit a spot for many days, painting for an hour, then pulling out another canvas for the next hour.

Some artists like Gerhart Richter took a more post modern approach to their paintings of photographs and made obvious the source of their painting. There is a certain self referential quality that makes it seem more at home.

A lot of painters who use photos as a source are almost telling a “lie” by portraying their photo as the actual place…Sometimes a photography is better suited to just being a photograph, than being translated into a painting.