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In a world where televisions must have 3D technology to be adequately entertaining, contemporary society seems obsessed with attaining a replication of life. I confess I am somewhat partial to Charles Baudelaire’s claim that ‘from day to day art diminishes its self-respect, prostrates itself before exterior reality, and the artist becomes more and more inclined to paint not what he dreams but what he sees’. Up until the modern era, much of Western art was based integrally on the idea of achieving a degree of realism—capturing life and reality. It is, however, only more contemporary realists, whose work developed predominantly in the late 1960s, who have produced paintings and drawings which simulate photographs. It is not the social message or the artist’s unique interpretation of the subject matter which draws the modern audience to gape in awe at these unnervingly accurate imitations of life. What impresses the audience is the technique and precision of capturing a snippet of ‘reality’.
I am particularly intrigued by how Photorealism captures and conveys the human condition, compared to a supposedly opposing movement: Impressionism. I say ‘supposedly’ because there lie several parallels between the two, which often go unacknowledged; both, for example, rely primarily on intense observation of their subjects. It is in how the artist chooses to perceive and interpret the subject, followed by how that interpretation is translated to the work, that the process differs. An impressionist, for example, would typically observe the subject closely, but the emphasis would be on capturing the play of light, the artist’s impression of the atmosphere, and as the French poet and critic Théophile Gautier defined it, the ‘essence’ of the subject. Paul Smith (1995) eloquently describes... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline