Artist - Richard Estes

Richard Estes (May 14, 1932) is an American painter who is best known for his photorealistic paintings. The paintings I found were mostly architectual and included reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. Estes' paintings from the early 1960s consisted of people throughout the city engaged in everyday activities. Later, around 1967, Richard began to paint storefronts and buildings with glass windows, and more of the reflected images shown on these windows. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s, with painters such as Ralph Goings, Chuck Close, and Duane Hanson.

Author Graham Thompson wrote "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs.

I was able to find out that Estes used mostly oils to create his photorealistic images. I was unable however to find out if he, like Chuck Close, used a photograph as the basis for the image. Regardless, his renderings are fantastic and play into my obsession with detail.