this painting of an m&m package is amazing in how utterly undistinguishable from reality it looks. And yet, it’s undoubtably a painting as the video shows a timelapse of it being painted.
None of the equipment or techniques used seem out of reach to a painter from the 17th or 18th century yet I’ve not seen any art before the modernist era that came anywhere close to this level of photorealism.
Is the ability to create such paintings genuinely new? Or is there another reason why paintings like that aren’t common throughout history?
Holbein was optically accurate, Rembrant and Caravagio had a good command of how light actually hits.
Photography did affect how people saw things they hadn’t noticed before, because it put everything on a flat surface that the brain would otherwise not process in 3D: such as how we look through a window at what’s on the other side and filter out what’s reflected back, or vice versa. Photography enabled the artists brain to organize the view so both could be incorporated into the picture
Technically nifty, and an interesting insight into how the brain functions. but Art is a lot more than a scientific value. Photorealism is just the same to representation as advanced calculus is to arithmetic.
You mean this caravaggio where the guy looks like a baby Rowan Atkinson?
Of the 3 Estes paintings I’d say the 3rd looks the most convincingly like a photograph but the first two are still obviously paintings.
I’m not saying that all art should be photorealistic or that every artist should aspire towards that style. I’m asking why nobody ever produced a single painting in that style to the technical ability of that youtube video until relatively recently? Didn’t any painter, when staring at a bowl of fruit, ever just wonder if he could paint it so accurately someone could be fooled into thinking it were real, purely as a technical exercise?
Photorealistic painting is new not because it couldn’t be done before, but because nobody had any interest in it. People have always appreciated realism in painting; all that’s changed is our standard of what “realism” means. The painting in the OP looks nothing like a real bag of M&Ms. What it looks like is a photograph of a bag of M&Ms.
Right. We are used to interpreting photos as “reality”, but they aren’t, and they are different in many ways from how our eyes and brains actually process images. So that particular distortion of reality didn’t occur to artists until photos were common.
There are some extremely realistic paintings, with a different set of distortions than the ones photos make, that were painted pre-photography. I am a fan of Dutch landscapes in that style.
Well, they did. It was called trompe l’oeil, and it used perspective as well as careful shading and modeling to create as accurate as possible illusion of reality.
The most convincing of the old realists used artificial lighting on their subjects, since that could be controlled long enough to get everything right. The breakthrough was made (with the aid of photography) by Thomas Eakins. His outdoor paintings can be pegged to the hour of the day and to within a few days of the year, based on the position of the sunlight.
Tim’s Vermeer - not a great description on IMDB. But, it’s a very good documentary about exactly the issue - photorealistic paintings - and technology and so forth, that is of interest here.
People have to remember that artistic techniques are like any other technology; they have to be invented. There was no reason why people couldn’t write novels in classical Greece but they didn’t.
Yes, realism in art was and is still about *representing *reality, not about *duplicating *it, and meanwhile anyone who has really observed it knows that the best photograph is not exactly what the naked eye sees. Until you see it you don’t expect something to look like that. When the Renaissance artists figured out proper perspective and optics paintings became highly realistic but still not like photographs, because people did not see things like a camera.
Da Vinci used wire grids, ‘painting glass’ was commnly used for painting outdoor scenes. Some artists have solved perspective issues by simply doing the math. Through the ages artists have used whatever tools were available to improve their paintings.
As for photorealism, I believe it was even more desirable before there were photographs. I always assumed that the lack of early photorealistic paintings was due more to the lack of pigments of certain colors or other technical limitations. When did we finally develop the full range of pigments necessary for true photorealism?
So the answer is first off that there was art done in an extremely realistic style, be they Trompe l’oeil paintings like this one from 1737, or other still lifes, or camera obscura based scenes.
But more so because the idea of art as an exact replica of some static item as seen is not a concept that has had much appeal in most cultures.
The how to disrupt and to what ends has been more the changing fashions over time. Take for example the transition from the Academic Movement in France into both Realist Academicism and into the height of Impressionism … both reactions to a desire to idealize that was the salon style with formats that dealt more with what artists felt was more real … in subject matter and in perception even if they both went at capturing how we actually perceived from different directions.
I would take it farther and posit that part of the experience of art is that we as the viewers complete the process and do some work. Art is not just a realistic representation of stuff and not just something pretty but something that requires us to engage actively. If all an object is is a realistic copy of something then it fails for most of us as art.
TLDNR … few did it before for the same reason that few do it now. Most viewers are not very interested in it other than for its novelty value.
