A Genoa Photo Series Becomes a Hand-Painted Art Project

A photography project can change shape long after the pictures are taken. For one photographer, a summer visit to Genoa has become the starting point for a much slower undertaking: reworking photographs as layered, hand-drawn and painted images. The first finished piece shows what that process can do with a detail as familiar as an elaborate doorway.

The Genoa photographs were made at the start of a run of trips beginning in August. The photographer had already shared some images from the city, but felt that the photographs themselves didn’t quite express the admiration and excitement the visit had inspired. The new idea was to make versions that looked less like straightforward photographs and more like drawings or paintings.

A project that kept growing

The plan sounds simple enough when described in a sentence. In practice, it has meant revisiting around a hundred photographs, choosing which ones to develop, and creating roughly half a dozen separate image layers for each. Those layers are independent variations made with AI tools, intended to become material for further work rather than finished pictures on their own.

That initial preparation produced about 700 images to label and organize. Renaming and filing them proved to be the most unexpectedly time-consuming part of the project. The photographer says that work occupied most of the last two months. The task is now complete: the final 600 layers were labeled and filed on the evening before this first finished image was presented.

There’s a useful distinction here between preparing material and making the artwork. Sorting hundreds of files may seem like an administrative step, but a project built from many versions of each photograph depends on being able to find the right pieces again. Once the files are organized, the actual decisions about composition, drawing and finish can begin in earnest.

From image layers to a finished scene

The next stage happens on a drawing tablet. The artist assembles the prepared images in layers, draws and paints over them, erases selected sections, adds new layers, and then brings the elements together again. The process repeats until the image feels finished, a judgment the photographer describes with some uncertainty. That open-ended quality suits a project where the source material is photographic but the goal is a more handmade result.

It also means the first piece is a beginning rather than a demonstration of a fixed formula. Each photograph may call for different choices: which parts to preserve, which to redraw, and how much to change the original image. The account doesn’t specify a single visual rule for the whole series, and that leaves room for the pictures to develop on their own terms.

The first image: an ornate doorway

The photographer introduces the first completed work as a view of what appears to be a decorative lintel above an elaborate doorway. The description is deliberately tentative. After the time spent preparing the images, many of the original scenes have faded from memory; the obvious details are easier to recognize than the precise circumstances in which each picture was taken.

That lapse in memory adds an unexpected dimension to the process. The photographs return as visual material, but the artist isn’t relying on a detailed recollection of every place or moment. The work starts with what can be seen in the image now: a doorway, its ornament, and the shapes and textures available for drawing and painting. The result can be approached as a new interpretation of the photograph, rather than simply a record of the visit.

The photographer expects more doorway images among the works to come. That gives the series an informal thread to follow, while leaving its eventual range open. One finished picture is enough to establish the method, but not to show how varied the later pieces might become.

Persistence is part of the work

The project’s scale is striking partly because the photographer admits that this kind of undertaking often ends in a familiar way: it becomes too much, and the work is abandoned. This one has reached that point before, or seemed likely to. Yet after the long stretch spent naming and sorting files, the photographer has carried on—and now has a first finished image to show for it.

There’s no claim that the rest will be easy. The next phase involves repeated drawing, erasing and rebuilding, and the photographer’s closing thought leaves open the possibility of quitting. That hesitation is part of the story, not a promise about the series’ eventual size. For now, the practical achievement is clear: a large bank of source material is organized, the hands-on work has begun, and an ornate Genoa doorway is the first image to emerge. The next pictures will show whether sheer persistence can carry the project through its more creative, less predictable stage.