THE TINY BRUSH SYNDROME
The question as to why any art style persists presumes that there is an easy answer and when it comes to Photorealism it may be less to do with art than societal expectation. On first seeing a photograph around 1840, the influential French painter Paul Delaroche proclaimed, ‘From today, painting is dead’. Of course, history proved that he was wrong and painting is as alive now as it ever was. However, using photographs either as an aid, as did artists like Degas, Vuillard and Bonnard, or as a basis for making intricate copies of the world like Close, Estes and Flack, continues unabated and photography is an art form in its own right.
At a recent open studio event of a Photorealist in Adelaide I listened to the conversations between public and artist. There were essentially only two questions. How long did it take to do and what did it cost? The question as to why Photorealism was the preferred style of the artist or even why Photorealism persists was never asked but there is no doubt that the painting of ever smaller details remains as a measure of the quality of the art and the artist amongst the general public, and that collectors are attracted to works where they see evidence of enduring skill and craftsmanship that stands outside of trends in the marketplace. There is no doubt that photorealist work sells.
When Chuck Close painted the photorealist Big Self Portrait in 1967/68 the reaction from the public, and the hanging committee for the competition he had entered, was one of disbelief shortly followed by disillusion. The question was asked as to whether this was even art any more in that it denied the mythical first-hand face-to-face connection between artist and subject. That question is seldom asked these days and artists such as Canaletto, Vermeer and Rembrandt who used a camera obscura, are glossed over the public mind while much-romanticised artists such as Monet, van Gogh or Turner are lauded for what they were doing in the face of nature. However, the hyperrealistic and photorealist approaches have persisted with digital photography and AI imagery providing opportunities for ever higher resolution.
Having all elements of a painting in detailed sharp focus certainly tests its believability as reality. The human eye cannot achieve this state and while the photograph itself can, given an extreme depth of focus, it doesn’t discriminate. The camera collects everything within the limits of its processes. Essentially photorealism produces a fantasy rather than reality and the introduction of digital and AI exacerbates this idea much as cinema moved into the realms of the impossible with science fiction and action movies and away from staged drama.
Photorealism in painting though conjures up the “real” for many people while simultaneously negating it upon recognition of the materials being used. Photorealistic paintings and drawings are often mistaken for photographs, but the question remains as to why artists would want to imitate photographs at all given that the camera is a passionless eye and copying a photograph over a substantial period of time with a one haired brush removes all emotion from the process.
Interestingly, I grew up during the fifties and sixties when TV was in its infancy and Hollywood still provided the world with its version of glossy reality. The distinction between the two platforms soon became irrelevant. However, TV programs that attempted to take the gloss off the polished fiction of cinema and promote the lives of ordinary people using the same half dozen storylines, eventually became reality TV – a ‘more real than real’ experience that connects to relatable, ‘everyday’ subjects. Viewers continue to revel in the lives of characters who seemingly resemble their own with successes and failings albeit heightened by improbable storylines. The extension is of course the selfie craze where personal reality becomes fantasy though choice.
David Shields in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto promotes the idea that ‘Living as we perforce do in a manufactured and artificial world, we yearn for the “real,”. We want to pose something nonfictional against all fabrication’ and yet, the photorealist painting is far removed from reality and is complete fabrication. Perhaps it is not the ‘real’ but the time factor that is at play. The need to slow down life and the welter of ever-shifting imagery is an all-pervasive compulsion in the 21st century but preserving a moment in time presupposes that such a moment is worth recording, particularly if is connected to an emotional life highlight. The selfie is a case in point. It is a moment in time however conjured in terms of physical appearance and in a lifetime of such moments succeeds in stopping time just long enough the camera shutter to work.
There is if course nothing new about detail in painting just as there is nothing new about expressive brushwork or no brushwork at all, as in the case of paint pourers, so is there even a line to be crossed at this juncture in time. Critics often dismiss photorealistic works as technical exercises lacking originality or emotional depth and that copying photographs undermines artistic authenticity by reducing the artist’s role to replication rather than creation. Photorealism for all its supporters, rejects painterly qualities through which individual artists can be recognised and the emotionally neutral banality of the subject matter further removes the product from any sense of perceived experience.
Perhaps the answer to the question lies in two areas. One could be a nostalgic yearning for the era of craftsmanship in the face of factory-driven mass production. The other could be what might be called a simplifying of life. The photorealist image arrives without emotional entanglements, complete within itself and defying interpretation. It simply is.