I mean, it’s more skill than I’ve got for sure, but I’m wondering if an artist who creates photorealistic works in paint or pencil or what have you is considered a great artist by other artists. While I’m as wowed by it as the next not-artist, it does seem like it’s basically achieved by getting the glossiness and shadow right, which are, y’know, just colors on the page, like any other color, just the right ones in the right spot.
I’m not even sure if this question makes any sense. It was better in my head. Like my feeble attempts at art.
It requires a lot of technical skill and that has --pretty much-- always been respected. But for me, and probably for most art lovers, a highly individual style trumps a photo realistic style.
For example if a artist makes an pencil drawing and uses a blending tool to get rid of all visible lines – I think that’s much less interesting than if the artist creates shading with his line work. You can see his strokes and “feel” the movement of his hand. The same thing goes for brush strokes versus airbrush painting or painting where all brush strokes are smoothed to invisibility.
Generally I’d rather see an unique artistic style than an attempt to strictly copy nature.
Ralph Goings’ work has always been that way for me: I can pretty much instantly recognize his work. Even tho it’s damned close to being a perfect reproduction, there’s just something about his touch to something that makes it both a reproduction AND a stylized portrait. I find his work amazing and endlessly fascinating.
An artist is still expressing himself, even if the result is highly “realistic.” Even photographers do this–not all photographs are identical.
Jesse Trevino, born in Monterrey but raised in San Antonio, was a talented artist from boyhood. He won a scholarship to art school but a draft notice intervened. A landmine brought him home from Vietnam, but his right arm was soon amputated. So he trained himself to paint with his left hand. Lately he’s been doing murals, but his earlier work might be considered photorealistic.
There is a recent documentary film called Tim’s Vermeer, in which an American inventor and non-artist attempts to paint a replica of one of Johannes Vermeer’s paintings using optical techniques (lenses and mirrors, basically). The resulting painting looks very close (at least based on how it looks in the film; I’ve never seen either the original painting nor the replica).
(One of my other pastimes–pointing out quotations questionably attributed to George Washington. Even beyond those featured on Mount Vernon’s Spurious Quotations section.)
Well I wouldn’t call it photorealistic, but obviously he was using a photograph as a reference. I can’t help but feel, looking at his pictures, that the quality of development technology at the time affected his palette.
