CT&D #38. Artistic Styles

Thinking about some of the artistic styles (pointillism, impressionism, dada, renaissance, etc), what is your favorite and why?

Thinking about many of the artistic styles I have learned about before and still learning now, my favorite has to be photorealism. Photorealism to me is an interesting and intriguing art style that I think requires concentration, dedication, and a fondness for reimagining a work of art in the terms of another medium. Since photorealism deals with an artist gathering information on a photograph depicting an object, place, or person, and such information forms the basis of recreating the photograph in terms of a painting, I really respect the amount of work and effort put into making a painting look real (or kind of real; not exactly mimicking a photograph).

However, even with the intention of making the subject of a painting mirror its photographic counterpart in a close-to-realistic view, I sense a different kind of realism that photographs cannot quite capture. Looking at various examples of work based on photorealism, I notice that artists try to project tones, shades, and reflections that certain colors give off (and the materials that don them); for example, a leather couch being shined on by the sun would evoke the need for using light and dark color shades to show shadow. One other thing I notice about photorealism is focused prominence and subtlety of colors in a painting that may not be highlighted as well in a photograph (depending on exposure and including black and white photos). For this reason, I consider photorealism to be more “environmentally” precise for settings since a painter can control what colors we see vs. photography where photographers cannot always control their environments due to factors like weather playing a role in lighting for example.

And even with color photos, one would need to adjust sharpness, tone, and contrast (or properties like ISO, aperture and shutter speed) to bring out certain hues into the foreground and lessen others into the background and vice versa. With that said, I believe artists working with photorealism try to show more color focus and succeed in doing so because they work in paint, where one would have a huge advantage in emphasizing distinct colors with or without balance and using as many as appropriate for a subject to depict such work in full creative but true form.