Let Us Now Praise Photorealism
On a late watercolor workshop, we were invited to bring art books to share with the group. I knew that my selection of painters would get at in the most suitable way mixed reviews, but I wanted to test some nascent theories of my own about painters and painting. I choose two unrestrained b generally-format retrospectives, one Robert Bechtle and the other, Richard Estes, both reigning deans of photorealism. The reactions were predictable. Tactful rejections of work by my fellow painters on the bases that the stuff looked just too much like photography. “What’s the applicable of painting like that?” This came despite the fact that almost one quarter of the plates in the Bechtle book were watercolors.
Bechtle’s watercolors of mundane suburban motifs are a course into one of the essential contradictions in the nature of photorealism painting as fine art. In those watercolors, particularly in the enlarged details, Bechtle’s mastery of usual watercolor technique leaps from the pages. Despite the photographic effect of the image, there is no mistaking that these are nothing less than extremely proficient and painterly watercolors. The same is true for the watercolors of another photorealist, Ralph Goings, whose back and forth between media had opened my eyes to the use of abstraction to generate an effect otherwise taken for a mechanical process.
Richard Estes shows only oils, and among many figurative purists he is reflexively rejected for the vivid dazzle of his work. Unlike Bechtel and Goings, there are no Estes watercolors or drawings to force the viewer into insomuch as why these are paintings of the highest order. To realize just what Estes accomplishes with pigments and brushes, the paintings have to seen in person. Looking at reproductions of Estes’ photorealism in oil, no meaningfulness how perfect the process, the paintings will always appear to look just like (ready for this), photographs! Duh… ...
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