Artist richard estes biography of martin lawrence

In contrast to the acutely personal, emotional, unstructured, and some would contend self-indulgent aesthetic of The New York School, Estes among others introduced a form of painting that emphasized control and an almost machine-like precision. In part, his style emphasized the craft of painting, which was central to the hard-edged, jaw-dropping verisimilitude of photorealistic art.

Artists like Estes, Audrey Flack , Chuck Close , and Ralph Goings abandoned the drama of gestural painting and promoted a kind of hyper-realism that seemed more visually descriptive of the increasingly high-tech, post-war age. For Estes, the appeal of the gleaming, reflective surfaces of New York City were irresistible. His paintings, composites of multiple photographs, suggest that the modern world is a sharply articulated one of clean, intersecting lines: orderly and systematic in presenting information about itself.

Rather than humans, every kind of material and object tells its own story in an Estes painting to which the artist has always been reluctant to assign symbolic meaning. Estes considers this piece, which depicts a young man curiously peering out of the window of a Greyhound bus, to be his first mature painting. His work from the late s and early s had been an experiment in looser brushwork - something along the lines of the Realist paintings of the mid th century.

Artist richard estes biography of martin lawrence: For Hopper, marks the

He abandoned that style for his trademark hyper-realistic paintings in which paint is applied carefully and brushwork deemphasized to the point of being invisible - almost a photograph. At first glance, it is easy to understand why his paintings can be confused with a photograph: the reflective qualities of the car hood and windshield, and the sheen of the metal paneling on the bus, seem almost too true to life to have been painted.

These "vehicle-reflection paintings" were the first successful series for Estes, who worked on them between to ' These paintings are also evidence of the artist taking on abstraction.