Spirit of Place: Hand-Painted Photographs by Maria Muller

Pucker Gallery

Aug 5th, 2016 7:51 pm

Maria Muller's hand-painted photographs have the capacity to evoke the spirit of place through her deeply personal and deliberate use of color, one of the artist's most fundamental tools.  In her travels, from young adulthood to present day, Muller is constantly taking pictures and visually documenting what she sees in these often unfamiliar places.  Her choice of color is influenced by a variety of elements including pure instinct, a vivid and active imagination and a well hidden, but often sardonic sense of humor.  Whether she is traveling close to home or on the opposite side of the world, it is the realism of her black and white photography and the whimsical fantasy of her vibrantly colored daydreams that combine to produce works that transport viewers to a world altered by color and imbued with spirit of place.

Hand-painted photography is certainly not a creation of Maria Muller, rather a technique that in its infancy was used to add color to a black and white image when color photography did not yet exist.  This initial method of hand painting was exceedingly subtle and the application of colored pigments would only slightly tint the surface of a uniformly grey image.  Muller's approach to hand painted photography, however, aims to saturate the surface of the photographic paper with color that is rich, vibrant and full of energy.  Her process begins with infrared film, a film that is sensitive to light in a way that alters the black and white tones in the negative.  For example, skin tones and foliage appear much lighter in photographs taken with infrared film than if the same subject were photographed with standard film.  The film is developed and processed by Muller and is printed in the darkroom in the basement of her Medford home.  She selects the images she deems worthy of hand painting and begins this process at the drafting table in her studio.  The images are colored by applying thin layers of translucent oil pigment with cotton swabs and then smoothed with tissue paper to create a remarkably flawless surface.  Once the proper color is achieved Muller—who credits primitive and tribal art as a major influence—will often embellish the painted photographs with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of enamel dots applied with a tiny paint brush.  The effect is that of a different kind of pointillism, one that provides a dizzying, visual texture felt keenly by the viewer's eye.  The result of this lengthy, often tedious, process is a lushly colored image that embodies the surrealism of the artist's imagination, transporting the viewer to a world that bears little resemblance to the black and white reality of the original photograph.  

Muller's fascination with color is particularly conducive to travel and the exploration of foreign locales.  In the hand painted photographs of her travels she is able to transport her viewers and communicate the sense of being in a place and time through the addition and manipulation of color.  In 1994, a trip to a series of small towns around Cordoba, Spain presented Muller with a vivid and variegated area of the world that is an enchanting amalgamation of history, art and architecture.  The buildings in these towns are simultaneously Moorish, Mediterranean and Spanish and Muller is able to capture this unique melding of cultures in her coloring of their facades.  In Dove, Spain two buildings overtake the background: the stuccoed architecture may be the same color in reality but Muller chooses to distinguish them more markedly, perhaps exaggerating the warmth and luminosity of the city and its culture.  One is painted a warm cinnamon tone, the other in a slightly lighter hue, almost the color of sand.  A slip of baby blue sky pokes out from between the two structures hinting at the day's magnificent weather and bathing the viewer in the warmth of the European sunshine.  The fronds from an enormous palm tree droop lazily into the image from above reminding us that although we sit in this courtyard that bustles with activity and life throughout the day we are only a breath away from the beach and the sea. 

Also in 1994 Muller traveled with her husband's family to Botswana, Africa where the group embarked on a safari through the Kalahari Desert.  As can be expected on such a journey, a new element entered Muller's work: animals.  Not domestic animals or pets, but wild animals, animals that the artist had never encountered before, and would probably never see again.  These animals in their natural habitat provided Muller with the opportunity to bring her unique, often humorous, manipulation of color to an arid landscape that is otherwise monotone, muted by intense desert sunlight and intensified by infrared photography.  In Red Lechwe Herd, the antelope are scattered across the foreground of the composition; they eating, grazing, fighting, some are looking the viewer dead in the eye.  In true Muller fashion, the deathly parched landscape has been manipulated to include some muted greens, a color that will not grace this part of the world for many more months.  In true Muller fashion the sky—although photographed during daylight hours—carries the blush colors of a romantic desert sunset.  For those who are lucky enough to find it, a tiny bit of humor exists: those lechwe staring curiously at the caravan of safari-goers and into the lens of Muller's camera have undergone a small make-over complete with flirty, elongated eyelashes like those found on a toy doll.

Some of Muller's more recent travels have taken her to South Beach in Florida: a unique destination for the artist in that the color of the place in reality in some way matches the fantastic color of the artist's imagination.  In its most recent incarnation South Beach and the city of Miami have emerged as a hot bed of color, culture and activity.  Forget snowbirds and BINGO, think spicy flavors, pulsating color and a soulful population of residents and visitors that embrace this energetic and inexhaustible lifestyle.  A dear friend and new goddaughter brought Muller to this part of the world initially, but it did not take long for the artist to realize the city's capacity to inject her work with its energy and spirit.  The breezy, pastel hues of the building in Monstera Palm and Portholes, South Beach capture the warmth and vigor that imbues life in Miami's hippest neighborhood.  The bright, hot fuchsia and juicy, tangerine used to paint the drapes that hang in the windows present a sharp contrast to the muted turquoise of the building's facade.  The dichotomy of searing pinks and oranges on top of cool ocean blues recall the white hot nightlife of South Beach alongside the endless stretches of sandy beach that in its former life, are what made Miami so popular in the first place.  

Muller's travels need not always take her to an exotic locale.  In fact sometimes she is content to stay close to home and travel within the city that she has lived in for nearly ten years.  This past spring, a short lived time for those of us who are blessed with New England's finicky weather patterns, Muller made many sojourns to the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, just south of Boston.  Part of Harvard University and designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the Arnold Arboretum is a hidden treasure for Bostonians: imagine an enormous public park brimming with native New England flora and fauna, divided into smaller areas that carry names like Hemlock Hill and Willow Path.  It is at the Arboretum where the artist became enamored with trees, taking thousands of photographs, only a small portion of which she has been able to color at this date.  At the time of Muller's visits the trees that populate the Arboretum were still in their Winter garb; leaves and blossoms had ye t to sprout and the branches were bare.  In One Birch, Three Trees and Carmine Bushes, four trees dominate the composition, a single white tree in the foreground, three rose colored trees stand behind.  The web-like pattern of branches and stems is skeletal, causing the trees to taken on a human quality, like a parent presiding over three mischievous children.  Grass and leaves have been colored emerald and lime, a clumping of flowering bushes are hot pink and the sky is crystal clear and blue.  These colors are all premature at this time of year at the Arboretum and are depictions of the artist's imagination, but also perhaps her dreams of the warmer, more verdant springtime just a few weeks away.

 

Whether photographing in Africa or the Arnold Arboretum, Spain or Miami Beach, Maria Muller's hand painted photography captures the spirit of place and treats our eyes and minds to the depiction of a transformed world altered by the artist's profound understanding of and sensitivity to color.  Her hand painted images transport us to new locations that are vibrant and pulsate with the color and detail that exist only in the artist's imagination. 

 

— Elizabeth B. Burgess

     Boston, July 2006

Source: Spirit of Place: Hand-Painted Photographs by Maria Muller