The Gallery

by John Guetter

Hi!, and welcome to the "Gallery," where I store and share some of my favorite "artsy" painting projects. One of my little pleasures when I'm unable to travel is to print grayscale images of some of my favorite photos and color them. This collection shows some of the pictures I made during three homebound times in my life recently: In early 2018 when I was recovering from a broken leg, in the spring of 2020, and again in the winter of 2020 - 2021, when I stayed at home because of travel restrictions associated with the COVID pandemic.

I aim to create images that match up with my experience of the places, primarily through color. Sometimes I try to make it look a lot like the photo. Other times, I'll change the colors or the intensity to make it look the way it feels (or felt) to me. And sometimes, I'll just fool around and play with colors, to see how they turn out!

Making these pictures is fun for me, and allows me to interact with the places they represent in a different way than simply looking at photos. I hope they show a bit about how these places affected me, using shades and color intensity as a kind of emotional language. In some instances, you'll see two or more versions of the same place.

How it works: I start with a photo of a place I love and use photo editing software to strip the color from it. I print that image with a laser printer, and then color it, usually with watercolor markers, sometimes with chalk or watercolors, or watercolor pencils. Any semi transparent medium works. Even oils or acrylics might work; I haven't tried those yet. The following three pictures (of Athabaska Falls) illustrate the three main steps in the process.

Step One: Here's the original photo, in this case, of Athabaska Falls, a famous Canadian waterfall near Jasper, Alberta.

Step Two: Here's the laser printed photo, stripped of color and lightened up.

...and Step Three, here's the Falls again, warmed up a bit with brighter greens in the trees and some creamy beiges in the gray rock layers.. It was a dream of mine to visit this very spot for more than 50 years! I can't tell you how much I was glowing when I finally saw it with my own eyes. Maybe this image can!

No claims to great art here, just a place to park and share some of these projects with people who might be interested. Generally, the newest pictures I've done appear first, and I've mostly grouped them by destination. Below are a few examples; you'll find more on other pages in this blog. Feel free to share, download, or print; please give me credit if you do. And if you find the idea interesting, give it a try yourself, and see how it goes. Thanks for visiting!