P#44: Dining In: A New York Oyster Bar

Why Photoshop? -- How the Painting Can Trump the Photo

Bert Monroy: For our next one, you got the Oyster Bar. The Oyster Bar was a return to working with a lot of little shapes because that came right after Red Truck. The Oyster Bar is a scene in New York. It's a lot of filter work, a lot of layer styles, a lot of just playing around with effects.

Oyster Bar is a perfect example of how different the painting is from the photograph. If you look at the original photograph and you look at the painting, you can see where a lot of it's made up. In the photograph, which is taken from across the street, you can see inside the restaurant but it's very blurry. You can make out that there's a table, there's a chair, and stuff on a table, but you can't really make it out. (click the image for a larger version)

But in the painting, if you zoom in, you'll see every little glistening reflection on the fork, knife, and spoon on that table. It's like the neon in the upper left. In the photograph, it's neon and you zoom in and it's just this blurry red stuff but if you zoom in on the painting, you'll see the little wires that are holding the neon onto the sign, and the little drops of water that are glistening on the top of the sign from the rain that's coming down.

I got into a lot of detail on that one because it was the first time that I actually wanted to show an atmospheric effect, which in this case was rain. All the little drops of rain falling in the puddles on the street, that's all filter work.

If you look closely at the manhole covers, in the photograph, they're just a blur. It's just a big ellipse there with some dark cones whereas in the painting, if you look closely, you'll see that every little detail on the manhole cover is picking up the little highlights of the neon above it, and so on, so you can see that there's a lot more detail that goes into it. If you're there, you look through the manhole cover, you would see those but you can't see them in the photograph.

Audri Lanford: This one, I think of the ones we've talked about so far, and tell me if you agree with this, is the most clear in terms of the depth of field and how it's different than a photograph would be.

Bert Monroy: Damen --

Audri Lanford: No, no, clearly Damen is -- but I mean of the six we've talked about so far. Damen is a completely different level.

Bert Monroy: Actually, Oyster Bar, there are a couple of things, there's something in there that I had completely forgotten because I hadn't looked at it so long until I saw the print in the gallery, because the print is really big. It's huge. If you look at the puddles, on the sidewalk on the edge of the sidewalk, right into the street on the left side of the painting, and you're looking closely, in those puddles, you see reflections of buildings off in the distance, skyscrapers off in the distance.

I've drawn attention to the one in the foreground because I use it in my demos and show people this stuff. I created this little building and then distorted it and put it there but then the really faraway puddles way in the back there, I had forgotten those buildings. I had forgotten that whole bit of work because I hadn't looked at that piece closely until I saw it in the print.

Yes, there are a bunch of buildings reflected in there. If you look closely, you can see that there's stuff going on in the windows, details that are put in there that the camera would never pick up. In fact, in the photograph, you don't see the puddles. There are no puddles. If there were, they're not visible.

In the painting, I put them there because it's raining and it's dense in the street so there would be puddles so I created puddles and put reflections into those puddles so that they look like puddles and act like puddles would. The reflections are rippled where there's a drop that just fell and hit the water.

There are little ripples. They've distorted the reflection, they distort the area around them, and so on. There's a perfect example of something a photograph would never pick up because first of all it's so faraway. That far puddle is way down 54th Street.

It's halfway down the block from the field of view that you're looking at, and you're across the street from the scene, so you're seeing the puddle that's all the way half a block away, and you're seeing the detail of the buildings in that puddle that a camera would never pick up.

In Closing

The fact that it's not a photograph is precisely what makes this New York oyster bar so intriguing: the interplay of details and light demonstrate how photographic painting is its own unique realm of art.