When artist Stev'nn Hall was growing up, he was equally fascinated by both painting and photography, and excitedly pursued both, as well as film, while in college.
Growing up in rural Ontario, he was also constantly surrounded by nature, and although he longed for the excitement of city life, the impact of the natural world never quite went away.
It wasn't until later that he started merging his love of painting and photography with his memories of his rural home. He began snapping photos of the landscape, but was at first unsure with what to do with them.
Merging painting and photography has interested several artists, and there are many different ways to blend the two.
Some artists combine elements of classic paintings with incongruous modern settings for a jarring image, but Hall's artwork takes a more subtle approach, so that you can't tell exactly where the painting stops and the photo starts.
Check out some of his recent work below, and see how combining two different mediums can result in vibrant, dreamy pieces of art that look like living memories.
[H/T: Ufunk]
To create his images, Hall enlarges his photos and mounts them onto a board. The photos are then "distressed" or scratched and roughed up a bit. This creates an interesting visual effect, as well as makes the surface better for holding paint.
To create the bright colors and misty, dreamy textures, he combines oil paint, acrylic paint, and inks all over the photo. Some parts of the photo get obscured, and some get accentuated.
It creates an image that's at once more and less realistic than a regular photo or a regular painting!
Hall didn't always concentrate on landscapes and the natural world like this. His earlier work was mainly portraits, often with a violent twist like bloody wounds included on the faces of his subjects. But he's since moved on, and now explores other ideas with pieces like these.
For Hall, these paintings evoke his own childhood and growing up, faced with the vast landscapes of rural Canada. They're beautiful and peaceful, but also overwhelming in their largeness.
For Hall, they represent the combination of innocence, wonder, and fear that comes with childhood and with growing up.
When he first started working in this style, he only applied the paint and ink very sparingly to the photos, but as he kept working, he saw his work become more bold and adventurous.
So while his earlier pieces in this style are more like photos embellished with paint, his later work is half-photo and half-painting.
The solid realism of the photos also allows him to use the paint more freely, since the form of the painting is already there as a foundation. So he feels comfortable getting very abstract.
