What is Realism Painting?

Hi everyone. Today I want to talk about a subject that appears and reappears throughout art history and how it is understood and defined in today's art world. Realism is a topic while hotly debated is often misunderstood or oversimplified in discussion or social media. So I'm going to look at a few definitions and some artists from this broad category with an idea to evaluate my own work and have a clearer idea of what a realist painter is. The first and most obvious form of realism to mention is painting from life. So life drawing, still life painting, plein air landscapes etc. Any attempt to document the scene in front of the artist could be regarded as realism. In 1863 the French poet Baudelaire published his essay The Painter of Modern Life and along with Courbet set about establishing a set of rules for the modern artist who must be of his or her time and adhere to the following guidelines. Courbet said In 1888 the availability of celluloid film allowed George Eastman to develop a mass-produced camera and found Kodak allowing anyone to become a photographer without the hassle and the danger of developing their own pictures. The Brownie and its followers inspired a whole new form of realism. But before jumping in there I wanted to mention some painters that observe from life like Velazquez or Sorolla and Sargent who show in their own style how little detail is actually required to achieve a realist effect. It's clear from these examples that they painted what they could see in their own peripheral vision while concentrating on the focal point. An effect much closer to how we observe a scene with our own eyes proving that more detail does not equate to a more realistic image. However it's also broadly accepted that many of the old masters made use of the camera obscura. So even before the days of the camera artists were looking through lenses. But a good modern example of this idea is seen here like David Hockney's Highway Collage. His investigation into point of focus led him to take many photos from various angles to create an image more in tune with the human optical experience than the frozen moment captured by the camera. This idea was pursued in another fashion by Dali. He produced stereoscopic paintings and I've actually seen some of these in real life and it's very hard to describe through the use of photographs. You really have to see them in person but it's just two paintings identical in line but differing in color which when you view them together with two angled mirrors they mix optically to give a three-dimensional depth much like how 3D glasses work. Ironically it was the freeze frame that allowed artists to capture motion realistically for the first time. An English photographer called Edward Muybridge first used photography to close the debate over whether a horse has all four hooves off the ground in Gallop. Horse paintings before these photos often had the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear. Like in this example by George Stubbs who is one of the best horse painters from history. He went to great lengths to dissect horses and really understand their anatomy but even his human eyes couldn't see how that Gallop should look. It's undeniable that the arrival of photography led to studies of our world without time and in great detail. Whether it's rendering motion blur or showing us something that is only fleeting in reality. A host of new techniques became available and as such took the search for realism in another direction. Artists like Chuck Close pixelizing and using grand scale to create highly detailed portraits when viewed from afar and similarly Dutch artist Jalf Sparney using HD photography to examine his world in great detail creating beautiful images arrestingly detailed of subjects as mundane as a burger or a fried egg. Another subcategory or evolution of realism is the idea to take the everyday scene or use a highly realistic style to render a scene which in some other way disturbs or disrupts our sense of reality. Surrealists the extreme example take the investigation of realism into our memory and how much we use it collectively with our other senses to create our own snapshot of reality. Memories and dreams allow these artists to warp and bend the rules but using nostalgia like Norman Rockwell used in a lot of his work or nightmare these artists perhaps bring us closer to our collective experience as humans inviting us to look with our brains our hearts as well as our eyes at something akin to experience or emotion as the focal point. There are so many ways to depict reality with or without the use of a camera in my own painting style I'm using photo reference but editing it to my desire and often painting with a nostalgic or romanticized glow that could be inspired by Rockwell but on the other hand a lot of my commissioned portraits like this one lean a bit more towards photorealism. I too am on a journey to discover other methods of capturing reality as I see it and not necessarily how a camera lens sees it. I really love the looser styles of artists like Sargent but each time I start a painting with that in mind I end up getting lost in the usual sea of detail so it's a constant journey to try and change your thinking and experiment with different techniques. I think it's important to remember there are many ways to fit into the category of realism some via first-hand observation some using photo reference as a basis. All are entirely valid to me and I have many favorite artists in all of those categories. I hope you've enjoyed seeing a few today and that it might inspire you to think more about the type of realist painter you want to be. Until next time, thanks for watching.