Hand-painted Photography

“Photography has almost no reality, it is almost a hundred per cent picture, and painting always has reality, you can touch the paint; it has presence.” –Gerhard Richter

Like one of his favorite painters, the German artist Gerhard Richter, Raj practices the art of “overpainting,” that is, of embellishing a photograph with paint. An avid photographer for many years, Raj now enhances his photographs by adding acrylic paint. In a number of figure studies, he has painted over the entire photograph, abstracting the human form by flattening it with areas of bold, unnatural colors. In other examples, he has superimposed painted rectangles over sections of the photo circumscribing or highlighting a face or a body and thus heightening the potential for narrative or metaphoric interpretations of the imagery.