Paintings that look like real-life!

I really like the Ralph Goings stuff. Not really sure why.

Not a big art fan, but shit like this blows me away. I can look at paintings like this all day.

I agree, thanks for the link!

Not to be Debbie Downer, but these paintings aren't as impressive as you're being led to believe.. There is a very mechanical process and it can be achieved by almost anyone of robotic demeanor and an adequate amount of hand eye coordination, planning, and most importantly patience. You basically use an overhead projection to trace the outlines onto a canvas, a color chart to assist the paint mixing process, and a computer with Photoshop to find the numerical color values at any given point in the picture to mix the appropriate paint color. Then they use single bristle brushes so the level of paint control isn't really that extraordinary. These are usually done on incredibly large and smooth panels which minimize the skill needed to make the effects. When you consider the means they had to work with, the greatest examples of technical skills shown by painters are probably from the Flemish Renaissance with Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait the most notable example. It was done in the 1430's on a 32x 23" panel over multiple sittings so there was no means to capture the lighting characteristics from a single day like a photo can or to match the resulting drapery form and reflections. And because it was painted in northern Europe, there is greater fluctuation in the angle the sun hits over any given period of time that this would have been painted over so the days are much more dissimilar. A detail featuring an almost perfect reflection in a elliptical mirror. The diameter of the entire frame is only 3". Chandelier which is about 5" wide. Many of the sketches you see from Michelangelo or etchings from Durer are also more impressive achievements in technical skill. The established rules of organization as to how they depict the subject (cross hatch vs. scribbles; low contract vs. high contrast) showcase a better collaboration between eye coordination and planned imagination. Then you of course have the problem of asking at what point does the increasing physical resemblance one can achieve relative to a photo come so close that the purpose of the process itself becomes trivial and futile, undermining the entire purpose of painting and art.

I expected someone to post Rembrandt, whom I think is a the most worthy and preeminent representative of the Flemish golden age painters, at least for portraits.

I prefer Durer's hare and self-portrait to melencolia, which seems to receive attention more for the significance of the objects than their actual inherent art.

I also think StephenHero is placing a bit too much emphasis on the technical skill of the painter. As Ruskin said some time ago, that would be akin to considering the greatest writer the one whom has the greatest mastery of grammar. As an elaboration on what StephenHero mentioned, part of the problem with photorealistic painters is that the process itself begins to impinge upon imagination at some point. The form effectively becomes solidified and immutable due to the stringent demands of verisimilitude to their subject.

I don't really care a great deal if its technically inferior to other types of painting. If I like the result, I like it.

Regardless of how they achieve it, anyone who can create art like any of the above gets my respect. I can barely squiggle a cartoon; transferring a realistic image to canvas is real next-level shit to me.

+1 on what StephenHero said. I've never understood the point of boring hyperrealism in contemporary art. Just to show off technical skill? big fucking yawn.

This. You know what would really impress me from the photorealism school of art? If someone could create a photorealistic image entirely from imagination. Not just a photograph-like still life drawn from a process-intensive rendering of a real-life image, but a translation of imagined form to canvas in a way that seems photorealistic. To my knowledge, such a level of technical skill is beyond any of the photorealists' talents, reliant as those people are on photography and computers and the subjects they've chosen to document. If someone created a photorealistic envisioning of something equivalent to, say, Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam," I'd be impressed. At least with the technical skill of the creator. Past a certain threshold, "painting" photorealistic still lifes accomplishes little more than taking a photograph. If the goal is purely to recreate the real image as closely as possible, then you might as well take art out of the equation and just take a fucking picture. There's very little "art" in 99% of today's photorealism. At least very little art beyond the photographer's level of art. It's basically just graphic-design masturbation.

As a lover of art I respect the realistic paintings of pre-camera times but now that there are camera's I see no reason to paint a picture of something that you can take a picture of. Then again I mostly enjoy the Dada and Surrealistic art scene.

love this art. truly beautiful.

another lens between the object and the recorder

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I think Dadaism was the tip-off, but I'm not sure.


Part of the problem is that Michaelangelo isn't reliant upon photorealism, or really much realism at all. Most of what he does is take an aspect of life -- say, a human arm -- and mold it into something recognizable in significance, but altogether different and in concordance with the rest of the painting. So the arm is at the same time both an arm, but molds into the sky and hills, while still remaining connected with a like shoulder that flows into a sleeve.

I'll use Coleridge's aesthetic philosophies to elaborate, since Romantic aesthetic philosophy was the progenitor of modern aesthetic criticism as far as I know. Thus, in Coleridge's terms, Michaelangelo has imagination -- he sees nature and imagines it in his own way, he 'dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate'. This isn't possible with the strict ('mechanic' according to Coleridge) form of photorealism. 'The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material, as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such is the life, such is the form.' (The quote is appropriated from a lecture on Shakespeare, but it's equally applicable to other fine arts). As an adjunct, Coleridge's contemporary and sometimes acquaintance, William Hazlitt, wrote an essay which tries to explain the art inherent in the quattrocentro artists:

Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object. -- It is not so difficult to explain this term in what relates to expression (of which it may be said to be the highest degree) as in what relates to things without expression, to the natural appearances of objects, as mere colour or form. In one sense, however, there is hardly any object entirely devoid of expression, without some character of power belonging to it, some precise association with pleasure or pain: and it is in giving this truth of character from the truth of feeling, whether in the highest or the lowest degree, but always in the highest degree of which the subject is capable, that gusto consists.

...

Michael Angelo's forms are full of gusto. They every where obtrude the sense of power upon the eye. His limbs convey an idea of muscular strength, of moral grandeur, and even of intellectual dignity: they are firm, commanding, broad, and massy, capable of executing with ease the determined purposes of the will. His faces have no other expression than his figures, conscious power and capacity . They appear only to think what they shall do, and to know that they can do it. This is what is meant by saying that his style is hard and masculine. It is the reverse of Correggio's, which is effeminate. That is, the gusto of Michael Angelo consists in expressing energy of will without proportionable sensibility, Correggio's in expressing exquisite sensibility without energy of will. In Correggio's faces as well as figures we see neither bones nor muscles, but then what a soul is there, full of sweetness and of grace -- pure, playful, soft, angelical! There is sentiment enough in a hand painted by Correggio to set up a school of history painters. Whenever we look at the hands of Correggio's woman or of Raphael's we always wish to touch them.

its a shame that photorealistic art is considered a novelty. but its reassuring for me to think that people can instantly see the amount of work put into the pieces and appreciate it at that level. even the classic painters used projectors (sometimes as their dirty little upsidedown secret). growing up and being around the art scene in RISD the 80's and 90's as a kid and a teen, I get jaded to whats good artwise... but the photorealistic stuff serves as a bit of a re-boot for me. alyssa monks' stuff is always heavy handed but very very effective: