Bowdoin College Museum of Art Curator Frank Goodyear will discuss the exhibition Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting in the gallery.

Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting examines the role the relatively new medium of photography played in the evolving practice of one of America’s most iconic artists. During the last three decades of his life, Homer often created compositions of the same subject in different mediums including painting, printmaking and photography. His use of various media came from his interest in probing the way things look and the challenge of portraying them realistically. Homer often borrowed certain elements—the cropping, the blur of the background and the flatness of the composition—from photographic convention, yet his painting, based on unique optical experiences, was an artistic creation reflective of myriad decisions. To Homer, paintings had the potential to make a subject more clearly understood; photography added to that conversation about how to portray the world around him.