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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

As to technique: I expect he's using a modern version of camera obscura or similar, using e.g. a projector slide (i.e. non-negative negative) for a base.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_lucida

etc.

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according to this pdf:

http://www.ralphlgoings.com/downloads/j_parks_article.pdf

Your 'expectation' is dead on. In a way that's a pity! That way 'painting' gets reduced to painting over a projection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorealism

It's a strange use of the word 'painting', which to me does not bring an association with projecting an image on to the canvas with it.

There's still a lot of talent there. It's not easy to coax that level of realism out of oils, but it can be done.

However, he's doing a lot of those in watercolors, and getting watercolors to do that convincingly is (in my experience, anyway) quite a feat.

With that said, I'm usually more partial to more expressive artists--I'm not fond of the "human Xerox machine" approach to art.

But when the artist does it with this level of technical skill...oh, man.

Agreed 100%. I'm also not a fan of photorealism, but I believe that other posters in this thread are underestimating the skill of the artist. Especially now that I realize that he is working in watercolor, which doesn't easily allow the kind of layering that you can do in acrylic or oil.

That is disappointing. This means that the "vision of American life" is not in the artist's head per-se, but is just a photo. He's got talent like a talented photographer to see the scene, frame it, and photograph it, and talent in his hands to be a "human developing machine". These are impressive to be sure, but the spark that allows great artists to paint things the way they perceive them (or would like to) is missing in this technique.

I suspect that he does a lot of catchup bottles because he's "got that down" and its become easy for him.

It was some time after I became seriously interested in photography that I realized framing is a myth. Bad or amateur photographers look at a poorly framed result and regretfully discard it. Experienced ones cut triangles off the sides - or nowadays, straighten it up in Photoshop or Picasa. If you enjoy photography you might find it well worth revisiting your discard box.

The myth persists partly because in film and video, the frame is a much harder limit and requires a far greater commitment on the part of the person looking through the lens at the time the image is recorded...we do mess about with it in post-production, of course, but with far less freedom than a still photographer enjoys.

Don't be too harsh on the absence of the artistic 'spark'. Even magnificent artists like Durer employed grids to aid with proportion and perspective, and composed complex pictures by making numerous studies of posed models first. Much historical art would have been viewed as a matter of skill rather than talent by its creators, with the art stemming from the selective emphasis rather than a faithful rendering.

I agree with you about the ketchup bottles though. The body of work on display here seems singularly unadventurous in its choice of subject matter.

My wife is a painter; she tells me that it is actually pretty typical for modern painters to project an image on to canvas rather than paint from a print. An image that is painted from a print tends to be flatter and an image painted from a projection tends to have more depth.

Painting through projections is actually still quite difficult. Remember that what you see on the canvas is a lighted projection, and not true to the original photograph's color. What the projection can be useful for is retaining the proper proportions and locations of a highly detailed photo. The real skill involved here comes from being able to reproduce the color (the way they are shaped / blended) and paint without leaving any evidence of the brush.

Note: I have been painting / drawing for about 18 years and while I thoroughly enjoy the challenges of drawing (finding correct proportions / locations, creating volumous shapes through line), I find the process utterly tedious and boring while working on a painting. The reason I picked the brush up in the first place was to get away from the pencil.

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