The painted photographs of George Woodman are ripe with mental connections, rich evidence of the artist’s talent for noticing, for witnessing, for making new wholeness. These sensuous black and whites are intense with historical allusions, visual puns, and playful self-reference. Geometric swaths of colour inhabit the photos, bringing them to life in a way that reveals Woodman’s history as a painter and his lifelong immersion in art.
Woodman began his career as a painter when he was only 13 (falling in love with one’s art teacher rarely fails to inspire). For over 30 years he was an abstract painter; he worked and reworked hexagons, tessellations, patterns—all with a very deliberate sense of colour. George Woodman (April 27, 1932 – March 23, 2017) was born in New Hampshire, he grew up in an old New England family, and while they were not artists per say, aesthetic values were prioritised. He was an art professor at the University of Colorado and lived within a community of artists. Painting was in his bones. But after his daughter Francesca’s death, Woodman himself migrated from his 30-year career of painting into photography.
As a photographer, Woodman’s work was far more engaged in the world, playful and intense with meaning. He was a master of elision. Like two mirrors reflecting back into each other, images contain images contain images.
Woodman made a new wholeness from seemingly unrelated parts and the result is both mysterious and amusing. But the union that most makes these images work is Woodman’s painterly placement of colour into his black and white photography. This chromatic shift came naturally to Woodman given his background, and he did it with great balance and care.
While Woodman was clearly not the first photographer to paint on images, he was particularly deliberate and attuned to the nuance of hue and tone because of his 30 years as an abstract painter.
His painted photographs not only blur the lines between photography and painting, they also blur the lines between colour and black and white photography.
Text by Clayton Maxwell