Photorealism

Photorealism

Photorealism
Photorealism is a type of art in which the artist must look at a picture or image and paint the image onto a canvas while maintaining the picturesque essence. Mostly, this photorealism movement took place from 1960 to 1970. To be considered a photorealist, an artist must have dedicated five years of work in between this time period. Basically, the artist had to take a picture, and project it onto canvas making the painting itself BE the actually picture. Many of the painting of this sort looked like an actual camera picture due to the fact that the painting held all the same effects such as blurring and high/low definition.
There were also photorealist sculptors who took picture of people and made them into a painted sculpture often with real hair and clothes put onto the sculpture itself. These people along with the photorealists themselves were called Verists. Most of these Verists were doing their art out of the UK because most of them were British to begin with.
Robert Bechtle was one of the original verists who was straight out of San Francisco. He went to the Oakland School of Arts and Crafts from 1954 to 1958. He was drafted into the army after he graduated college and began painting his artwork in Berlin where he was stationed. He was also professional lithographer. The majority of his paintings involved cars parked somewhere. One of his most famous work was 64’ Valient, in which a car is parked outside a chicken diner. The images that Bechtle created looked exactly like real photographic pictures. Bechtle now teaches at San Francisco State University, and still creates photorealistic art to this day.
Another well known Verist was Audrey Flack, she studied art at New York University from 1948 to 1953. Her painting were characterized by feminine color schemes and were drawn primarily with pastels. Many of her pieces can be found inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of Flack’s well known pieces was a picture of crayons coming...