Gerhard Richter and the lack of style

“I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings,” he says. “Because style is violent, and I am not violent." A quote from Gerhard Richter.

Richter painted powerful photo-realistic images for years before turning more intensively to abstraction. I watched a movie several years ago which showed Gerhard preparing large abstractions for an upcoming exhibit. I believe the movie was titled "Gerhard Richter Painting" and is available through Amazon. I watched in fascination as he pulled entire lines of color across an existing field of colors, allowing the underlying areas to show through in some places, obscuring it in others. I was excited by what I saw because it closely resembled work I was doing in Photoshop, generally with images from nature.

I returned to my work and began interpreting Richter's approach in Photoshop; selecting a swath of the image notable for its colors or form, copying, then pasting, then transforming it across all or part of the original image. The next step is the application of a filter that best optimized my vision of how the two layers should blend. I merge the two layers and repeat this step again and again, until I see an image that moves me. It's a technique, not a style and some images I have worked on for years, still unable to discover what I believe is hidden in the colors. Others have jumped forward rather quickly.

It's a non-violent approach to image making that defies easy categorization. I'm sure I'll write about this more in the future because the modern age increasingly demands violence from the artist and his/her creations. The panel below was created with the technique I described. The detail suggests the rich texture of the original panel which is over five feet in length and difficult to see online.

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