Seeing True...
Jay Asquini’s Journey from Photography to Painting
Story by Diane McCallum • Interview photos by Michael Sarnacki

Continued...

This evening, I’m part of a set stage out on Jay’s deck and in the company of photographers: Michael Sarnacki, who suggested the evening’s session and Jay, the "bent metal and the men and machines that bend it" industrial photographer so familiar to those in ASMP, the Michigan chapter he helped found in the 1990s. These guys know light. Me? I squint and sit down, my chair and Jay placed to take good advantage of the light as afternoon becomes evening. We’re a non-still life around a table, there for me to take notes on, to hold the wine glasses, and later, to be the stage for a series of morphing still-lifes as paintings and sketches are brought out and shared.

So, what’s left, now? He’s recovered from falling 9 feet out of a tree — an accident so dumb, you still hear "I can’t believe I did that" in his voice. What endures of the expressive artist who calls himself "a competent photographer," who looked through a lens and shot most days for more than 20 years?

"I learned enough to be able to take nice reference shots!" he quips — but it took months to even find a point-and-shoot camera light enough to hang around his neck for more than 10-15 minutes. That experience made real to him, and his family, that the old Jay wasn’t coming back any time soon.

Pointing to Michael, head racked back and tilted at a very odd angle to catch Jay in mid-sentence, Jay said, "you see that?" I did, even as Michael shifted, crouched, then walked across the deck to perch again, refocused on Jay. "All the muscles at the back of my neck were cut to get to the spine. I can’t jump up and down to get stuff, or lug all I need around, or even bend to look through a tripod." Even worse, his energy level is unpredictable, leaving him unable to plan what he’ll be able to do from day to day, death to a photographer’s shoot-on-demand schedule.

But he’s got no regrets. The accident that catapulted him into painting has liberated him. He feels freer than ever, no longer confined to capturing other peoples’ needs in the lens, no longer distracted by the colors he saw that were taking the focus of his photos away from the story he needed to tell for his clients. "I used to have to work in black and white to get the transformation I was after in photos, to make the real world in front of the lens into art. Now I see these incredible colors, and can put them wherever I want, anywhere. I’m learning how to work with them, to control them, to marry the mood of a subject and the setting."

There were things he liked about photography: its decisive ease; the way a commercial photographer’s subject is given; the quasi-mechanical aspect to making the subject look great. And he liked that he was good at it.

His camera was also a great icebreaker. It opened any door and got him in anywhere. And he misses his Domke bag. The modified messenger-fanny pack he uses now, though functional, has nowhere near the same cachet.

After years of shooting to other people’s specifications, where do his subjects come from now? "They just show up, sometimes I wake up with one like it’s planted in my brain. Others I have to practice with. I struggle with them, like a photo that I might boil down in sketches till there’s just the lines of the body left."

Quite a departure from men, machines and metal? The departure began before he left. In the late 1990s, Jay began to stretch out into figure studies and street photography. He put together a vision portfolio showing where he hoped to go if he could break free of industrial work. He’d even started to get other types of assignments, other kinds of marketing work.

Life has a funny way of preparing you for what comes next.

"You know, graphic composition is very apparent with painting. As a painter, my style percolates to the top. Style is crucial to success as a creative photographer, but as a commercial photographer, 90% of the reward comes from being competent, not creative."

Now he’s free to let the creative aspects of what he sees, looking inward or looking outward show.

Now he uses a sketchbook about 4 by 6 inches–his "point-and-shoot," for pencil sketches. He draws, then "draws with an eraser" to remove all the lines except the true ones emerging as he focuses more on the subject. Then, with a tiny watercolor pallet the size of a PDA, he washes color into the image. Then, if it all comes together, the image will get reworked again as a study, then transformed even further, if it becomes the basis of a full-scale painting.

Through years of photography, whether working from an imagined image or a sketch, he sees how light enters, falls, and leaves a place, how it shifts to blue, dulling things down, throwing shadows. He’s learned how to layer paint and use color to get light in unexpected places, falling over a shoulder, into the corner of a room or burnishing the sheen in hair as it falls over a face. He’s very free with color, especially in his studies, putting it on heavily, and then restraining that in the final pieces, after he’s clear about what needs to move toward or recede from the viewer.

Yet another carryover — how to get models to do what he wants to get the image he sees. "In all those years of photography, I learned, trained, how to get what I needed out of models, how to pose them optimally, how to handle all kinds of people so my shot would pick up the beauty. Now as a painter, that expressive potential really dominates."

And the love and curiosity he’s always had for people? That’s endured too. Painting is almost as good a way to meet people as taking pictures. Both forms seek to find the story in a scene and let others connect to that. "Even with decorative paintings, there’s a story being told. Any painting, even if reduced to abstract lines, is still human enough to remind you it’s human. There’s a connection there." He searches a moment, trying to name the fuel driving the connection, " compassion, understanding, one human to another…" then shrugs, saying, "Maybe it’s love."

OK — so, in theory, even in feeling, there are a lot of carryovers. But what about the nuts and bolts? That switch from shutter to brush?

It took almost a year. His "collision with the planet" was August 26, 2001. On July 17, 2002, he picked up a paintbrush. Not like he planned it. It was in answer to a challenge from a good friend, Robin Vincent, also a painter and photographer. They were in the habit of meeting for coffee when she said that the next time they got together, they’d paint. Jay said he’d photograph her painting instead, and Robin shot back, "That’s bogue!" And so Jay was shamed into picking up a paintbrush.

"So there I am, she calls, and I agree to paint — but what am I going to paint? I have to figure this out. So I get a stack of photos that I really liked, and scrap paper — I always start on scrap paper!" And as he drew them, focusing on the bodies of his subjects again and again, transferring the lines in the photos to paper, he fell in love with it.

"I realized that this stuff is not difficult, as photographers we have trained eyes. Almost any photographer could do this with patience and the willingness to try. Start with tracing hands, see where dark shifts to light. After a while the true lines stick." He showed me his first sketchbook, and after what must have been weeks of hours and pages, somewhere in the middle of the tiny book, the true lines emerged. Angles of bodies softened, became less like hard edges, took on form, animation. And there’s a gentleness in some images that endures into the larger works. In applying the paint, Jay never forgets that these paintings have texture and feeling. The colors shading the skin of an arm are like freckles of color left by passing fingers.

"This entire experience has proven to me what a virtuoso I am as a visual communicator. There’s nothing I miss as a photographer. I really had my fill. Painting is more fulfilling, more personal. As a photographer I struggled to get respect for what I was trying to do in my personal work. Now, all of a sudden people like my personal painting! As a commercial photographer, I always made someone else’s photograph. Now I’m painting my own paintings. In fact, if someone was to commission me to do a portrait, I don’t know if I could do it – I’d be worried if what I was seeing would be acceptable."

Besides the technical skills that have transmuted from photography into paintings, there is something else that may have been there since Jay began to work to create images. It’s elusive, yet simple, his intent. He’s there to see, to find something to love, and to bring it to life. Maybe even to let it change him in ways he never imagined.

So every day in this new life, Jay says, "I feel blessed and fantastic. And every day I hurt and know my limitations a little bit better. My limitations are my realm and every day I learn to be more comfortable within them. Painting really complements what I can do now — I work for 5 minutes, then I sit. Then there are times when I’m really excited about what I’m painting and I can’t sit! It’s about managing it all. And I’m really great company at the bar, sitting there telling some stories. I couldn’t get a job doing this!"

So, go. See. Be present. Love it. Drink a toast to it.

Diane McCallum, a Detroiter and WSU alumna, lives in Ann Arbor. She has extensive writing and editorial experience and most recently worked on a number of articles about the Jesuit religious order in Michigan and Ohio for Company, a national magazine about Jesuit ministry.

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