Nothing gets me motivated more than Gerhard Richter’s immense series simply titled Overpainted Photographs. Whenever I’m down and blue, this brilliant collection is the punch of inspiration I yearn. This is a mammoth of a series, the sheer volume of his work is overwhelming to say the least. Some of my favorites of his painted photographs are ones whose texture adds or extracts from the texture of the original photograph; each color complementing or contrasting from the photograph’s original tone. I also enjoy how every gesture is irreversible.

To put it more elegantly is Jeff Ladd’s interpretation as seen on his blog, 5B4:

“For many photographers the image has no surface. The illusion of photography in providing a window into which we perceive literal description and dimension by Richter’s hand is now disrupted due to the addition of paint. Often a tense relationship, the results run the gamut of the surreal to the beautiful to the disturbed. It is all the more surprising that each in its perceived completeness was in essence accomplished by chance and trial and error.”