I think everybody has one genre of art that calls to them more than others, and for me it’s photorealism because it makes me nostalgic in a way that actual photographs can’t.  These paintings by Gregory Thielker transported me straight away back to Sunday family drives in the country and Christmas shopping trips into town as a  small child, and in more recent years, comfortable silences on the long drives toward and away from lost weekends.

Low Road

Cash Only

Above And Below

Coming To A Complete Stop

Dash

Division

Trace

Junction

Whisper

Under The Unminding Sky

Mass Pike Toll

via Alice @ My Modern Met

This post contains spoilers–please stop reading if you think you want to try this application (and I think you should!)

Go to this site (http://www.tackfilm.se/) and upload a picture of yourself. Then come back and read further!

I encountered this site via Hanna Wyrman’s updates on Facebook on Friday. She kindly informed me that this was an ad to encourage Swedish residents to pay for their license and support public television (I’m assuming that it is the same system as the UK/BBC).

Here’s what happens: after uploading a photo (I think the point is to upload your own, playing the vanity card here), a film starts. Its esthetic is that of a highly edited news report, with high production values. The stage is set for a press conference, interspered with multiple shots of people getting together around various media, tuning in to the news in different ways. An identity is going to be revealed, and, quite predictably, the main speaker at the press conference pulls out a photo out of an enveloppe and, voila, there is your picture! YOU are this mystery person.

But then the fun starts, as the ‘reporting’ continutes. And the ‘hero’ is celebrated in the range of settings foreshadowed in the first part of the film. And, the fun part, the photo continues to travel and shows up across a wide variety of settings, from public to intimate, from institutional to counter-cultural, from commercial to private. In the process, it’s hard not to get at least a bit caught up in the iconization of the image that is going on.

Of course, this is a highly artificial pastiche of how images circulate and are valued. But this little interactive media production does capture something that I think is crucial to contemporary visual culture: the effect of the combination of circulation and reinscription of images in different settings, and a combination of digital and optical approaches to photography, which amounts to ‘network realism’.

Ralph Goings is a realist painter based in California – he is recognised as one of the original members of the Hyper-Realist or Photo-Realist group of the late 1960’s.  His painstakingly accurate work spans four decades, and one of the things I like most about his paintings is that the subject matter changes little over the decades, showing that some things remain timeless and comfortably familiar.

Photo/hyperrealism isn’t really my kind of style, but you can’t deny these paintings are amazing.

…yes they are paintings. (…well apart from the first 2.)

Hyperrealism sculptures by Ron Mueck. Scary shit, incredibly talented. (…and he used to work on Sesame St. and the Muppets show!)

‘Omens of Hafez’ by Iman Maleki.

Diego Gravinese.

Diego Gravinese.

‘Don’t shed no tears’ acrylic on canvas by Denis Peterson.

‘Smirk’ by Alyssa Monks.

‘Steamed’ by Alyssa Monks.

"East of Dodge City, KS", Oil on Panel.

Jeff Aeling
Looking West

11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art
2004 Baltimore
Kansas City, MO
816.221.2626

Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday
Runs through: Jan. 2, 2010

Gallery site: http://www.sherryleedy.com

Someone once told me that this part of the world “gives great sky”.

The assessment was spot-on. From blazing sunsets, full of harvest dust, to towering thunderheads portending sheets of rain (and perhaps worse) to the broken, streaky, blue-and-grey bluster of a windy November afternoon, things tend to be pretty gorgeous from the horizon up around here.

Jeff Aeling gives great sky, too.

Aeling, a native Iowan who now lives in Kansas City, offers works of contemplative beauty and nearly photographic realism in his show Looking West, which runs early into next year at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art.

Looking West is more than a title; it’s a point of view. The works in this show are painted from an eastern vantage point … meaning a lot of prairie sunsets, over the Flint Hills and the High Plains.

Depicting the lights, shadows and colors of a dying Kansas day — and getting them right — is not an easy task. Aeling is more than up to it, though, as evidenced by such oil-on-panel works as East of Dodge City, KS (pictured above). Nor does he neglect the details on the ground; they are as well-executed as those of the air.

From the streaks of fading sunlight to the silhouetted cottonwoods, the orange and purple contrast of the clouds to the stalk-by-stalk texture of the sweeping foreground field, Aeling shows a treble mastery of vision, technique and subject in today’s featured piece — and in all the others.

Aeling does not confine himself solely to the Midwest and Great Plains, however. He continues to look — and paint — to the west, all the way to Hawai’i. And whether over land or sea, Aeling gives great sky all at every step of the journey.

There was a recent article in The Week about researchers who have reason to believe, from mapping brain chemistry, that, as we use GPS more and more, the location in our hippocampus responsible for spatial orientation will gradually go away.  Eventually most of us (and not just me) will have a sorry-ass sense of direction.  We shape technology and then technology shapes us.  It’s not a one-way relationship.

This, combined with the new Avatar teaser, got me to thinking about the technology of photography and how it, too, shaped us.  Imagine the world before photographs were even thought of — a world where no one has any notion of a moment in time being captured for the later re-experience of it.  A world without the idea of snapshots or preserved images of things.  There were paintings, sure, but paintings took a long time to make, were contrived, and very expensive. So paintings don’t really count.  So imagine you’re living in a world without photos, without any thought of photos, with no idea whatsoever that photography will ever exist.  How would you experience time differently?  How would you experience people differently?

Now tell me this: in this world without any photography whatsover (and no zoos), what would pop into your mind when I said the word, “Giraffe”?

You’d have read about them, maybe, and so you’d have a picture in your mind’s eye.  Have you ever wondered how you would imagine a giraffe to look if you could only go on discursive representation?  “Like a horse with golden-colored, spotted fur, only much larger, with a neck so great in height that it comprises 2/3 of his total size; horns protruding from near the ears; and very intelligent eyes. “  Maybe, if you were rich, you’d have a woodcut or a book that contained hand-colored drawings, made by explorers to distant lands, that attempted to illustrate the whole concept of this strange thing they call a giraffe.  Here’s what you might see:

This:

Woodcut of giraffe, 1486

Or this:

1551

Or maybe this:

1551

Or, finally, maybe like this:

18th century

(Images from www.strangescience.net)

Check out the scale, the musculature, the defiant-looking expressions and poses.  In shape as well as (or maybe because of) vibe, these specimens look considerably different from the giraffes walking around in our heads as the consequence of trips to the zoo or photos we’ve seen.  And don’t think they weren’t trying, these artists, to draw exactly what they saw.  It’s not like they knowingly misrepresented the giraffe. They probably believed that they were making kick-ass true-to-life renderings of the animal they saw.  Which would mean that when they looked at a giraffe, they saw something different from what you or I see when we look at a giraffe.

How could that be, you ask?  A giraffe is a giraffe no matter who’s looking at it, right?  Not exactly.  Our minds, as the Romantic poets said and as Goethe proved, half-create and half-perceive.  The power of the human imagination over the perception of reality–what we see and how we see it–is not to be underestimated.  There are lots of philosophical arguments to this effect, but the main thing is: what we see is constituted by how we see it, and how we see it is a function of what we’re used to, what we pay attention to, what we find beautiful or scary, what details happen to surprise us, our sense of our own bodies in relation to the thing seen, etc. . . . all kinds of unconscious factors affect how you would see this giraffe.

We feel like we know better, don’t we?  Because we have photographs, we think we know what things really look like, objectively.  Take a photograph of a giraffe, and there’s no way you’re going to ever be fooled again into believing that they have huge antlers growing out of their heads.  Along these lines, photography has become for us an index of accuracy, of versimilitude, of realness.  It is the photograph of the person/moment/animal/scene against which all other forms of representation will be measured as truthful or not.

So I wonder what’s going to happen as the truth-status of the photograph erodes with technological advances that make it possible to duplicate photorealism.  I’m fascinated by Avatar, for example–by the technology that enables Cameron to shoot the movie in three dimensions, literally: his camera sees and moves through the fictional world he’s created.  This makes the “animation” look much more photorealistic, as does his innovative capture technology.  Seeing the trailer for Atavar, one glimpses a future where digital animation may look just like photorealistic film.  We won’t be able to tell the difference between a 3-dimensional scene that’s been recorded and a 3-dimensional scene that’s been fabricated from scratch.  How will that change the way we experience the world?

I love to think about how the invention of photography in the early 19th century changed how people experienced each other and their environments.  For one thing, photography created a new relationship to time.  Before photography, this moment, right now, was lost as soon as it passed.  The only remaining visual evidence of how anything or anybody appeared in that moment was memory.  But photography means that, for the first time in history, you could experience a single moment in time over and over again, ad infinitum, if it was captured in a photo.   And not just the big-time events like Waterloo that painters recreated, and not just celebrated individuals or families (in painted portraits), but everyday occurences happening to ordinary individuals.  Baby pictures.  Wedding pictures.  Important “firsts” in a person’s life.  No longer lost to time, but captured forever.

Second, once photography picked up steam over the course of the nineteenth century, it inundated us with images.  We went from no photos to having photos of everything, everywhere.  Calling cards, for example,were often replaced by photographs: where once you left your business card when you visited a friend, now you left a photograph captioned with your name.  Photographic pornography emerged.  We started taking “mug shots” of criminals.  We started classifying, to ourselves and to each other, an object or event as “new” and photographed it accordingly.  The first car.  The Crystal Palace.  The first elephant brought to London.  These images were published as prints to hang on the wall, as calendars, as advertisements, as cards, as posters, as souvenirs.

And as we became overwhelmed with images, we had to begin organizing them in our heads, to categorize and classify images in order to judge what kinds of attention to devote to them and how much.  As a Victorian, you might walk right past a photo of a commodity, but you’d maybe stop and glance at a photo of a commodity being held by a girl.  You’d decide something about that commodity based on the girl’s appearance–is she posh and elegant?  a factory worker? –which means you’d draw conclusions about that girl based on a visual code you’d unconsciously adopted, a code of meanings extrapolated from purely visual signs, from other images of other girls. We started to look at what images of people had in common with other images of people: sameness more than difference.  The unique one-of-a-kindness of each us, the little details that set us apart, faded behind the categorical interpretation of the bigger idea.

Which brings me back to our present-day visual technologies.  How will fabricated, photorealistic, three-dimensional imaging change our relationship to time?  How will it change the way we read images, signs, visual cues, people’s appearances?  I wonder how the complete loss of truth-value for seemingly photographed moving images, images that are made up but in fact look “real,”  will change our perception of ourselves, our world, and our reality.

Until our lifetimes, every photograph had a referent in the real world–it was a visual signifier that referred to something that had “actually” happened or existed.  And generally, we are a society that likes to believe that most signifiers have a referent–that words mean what they say, that this rock empirically exists, that what I see is actually what’s present out there in the world beyond my skin, that there is “true” and “real” versus “untrue” and “false.”  Being an inordinately visual culture, we tend to use photography to help us distinguish between those qualities.  What will happen when the signifier doesn’t necessarily have a referent?  When photo-realistic footage doesn’t necessarily refer to something or somebody that actually happened?

Who knows.  Maybe it will change how we experience “realness.”  Maybe other senses will become important again, more important than sight.  Maybe we’ll start to value the sense of touch more than sight, or hearing, or smell . . . Maybe we’ll define “realness” or “truth” in new (better?) ways.  Maybe we’ll figure out a new sign system that is as of yet unimaginable to us, as did the Victorians.  Maybe our brain chemistry will evolve in a different direction than we expected.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.  The word says it all.  Perhaps the following will happen: rather than visually dividing the world into “true” and “untrue,” we’ll divide it into “possible” and “not possible.”  To the options of what is and what is not, we’ll add a third option: what may be.

"Striped Orchids", Watercolor.

Bess Duston

6:30 a.m-10 p.m.

Homer’s Coffee House
7126 W. 80th St.
Overland Park, KS
913.381.6022

Hours: 6:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Saturday
Runs through: Nov. 30

Gallery site: http://www.homerscoffeehouse.com

Some paintings are so realistic that they look like photographs from a distance. For Bess Duston, that distance is less than arm’s length.

Duston strives for photorealism, and she achieves it. Her watercolors and seriagraph prints, now on display at Homer’s Coffee House (in a joint Images Art Gallery show with Dennis Littleworth), are so crisply rendered and finely detailed that at first it’s hard to believe they weren’t produced with the click of a shutter.

In truth, the processes are far more painstaking. Duston, who has taught elementary school art and worked as an artist for Hallmark, does begin with photographs, for source images. But that’s just the starting point.

The serigraphs take several months to complete, she writes, as once the composition is completed and the drawing is done in the size desired for the completed work, I will do a separate ink drawing on a transparent film for each color in the piece, transfer the drawing to a prepared screen, and then print the edition in the desired number. I usually do between fifteen and twenty-five separate drawings, transfers, and printings for each edition.

Whether in watercolor painting or screen-printing, I look for strong contrasts in the pieces that I produce. Portraying the beauty that surrounds us is the challenge I give myself and I hope this is evident to those who view the pieces.

It is … and so is Duston’s skill at meeting her self-imposed challenge.

Striped Orchids, the watercolor which appears at the top of this post, is a prime example. It isn’t simply that the titular flowers are reproduced flawlessly. It’s the fact that the bare tree in the background is, too — providing not only another layer of detail, but also a spare counterpoint to the lushness in the foreground.

(And if you think you’ve seen Striped Orchids before, you might be right even if you’ve never been to one of Duston’s shows. Kansas City Voices magazine reproduced the painting in its November 2007 issue.)

Don’t let that — or this — be your only exposure to Duston’s art. Spend some time with it in person … just inside arm’s length.

Is up there with my absolute favourite painters. He is that rare thing, a virtuoso in several fields. He does expressive abstraction like the picture below, he is probably the best photorealist alive, and then he does hard graphic work with edges made with masking tape. Beyond that, he is political and has something to say. If I wished I was somebody else, or that I produced the work of someone else at least, his might well be it.

Abstraktes Bild 742-2, 1991

And then he is quite diverting with the rattle: I like everything that has no style: dictionairies, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violence, and I am not violent.)

Earlier this year we told you about our artwork featuring in the Business Superbrands Annual 2009.

For a while we were a little worried that our fantastic  green illustrations would never see a superbrand again… but luckily, “recession” doesn’t appear to be a word in CBRE’s dictionaries.

A few months ago our Tony Wilson and the jelly house team were back to illustrate the most recent advertising for the real-estate giant.

The various flat-colour and photo-realistic illustrations are featuring on their printed advertising material all over the place, so keep an eye out!!

Odessa has continued the expansion of the Sole Candy line for a second and third time with 11 additional colors. These are on shelves now for a discounted price for the next 24 hours. These are just as juicy as the first set of colors and then some! Fatpacks are also available for purchase… Also…we have the Pheobe shoe on pre-release for the next 48 hours! This style is soooo sexy, you’ll faint! These stilettos come in ten different color variations and also features the new HUD, photo realistic foot texture, HSL color picker, and much more!

Check out how lovely these treats are!

See you at VDI!!!

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vanity%20Designs%20Inc/118/8/22

Here is a collection of some technical perfect motor-cycle renderings that can be found on CGTalk. Click each thumbnail to jump directly to the full resolution image and to find more information about each work.

Digital Domain did a clean looking animation for the new Audi tagline, “Efficient-Technology, intelligently combined.”. Detailled information about the production and involved agencys and persons can be found at www.cgarena.com

See the video directly @ youtube after the break

Since nachofotos.com doesn’t allow image links for some time… I have to do it the old way and crop and link these interesting images by myself. Click on each of the thumbnails to jump directly to the sepcific CGTalk thread to see the fullres image…

i like the scifi look of the nanosuit that crytec is using for promoting the new crysis 2 game. On the crytec homepage it says that they won the red dot design award…  even if I wasn’t able to find any information on the red dot page about the nanosuit as a winner for 2009…

Here are some pics from the videos they have produced for the nanosuit 2.

The full videos can be seen @ http://crynetsystems.com/

Take a look at these amazingly detailed oil paintings on paper by artist Yigal Ozeri. Photographed from afar Ozeri then reproduces this work in oil with tiny brush strokes and lots of talent.
Great stuff.

See more here under artist Yigal Ozeri…www.mikeweissgallery.com

Ciao.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Identity:

two self portraits I drew in 2007 to express identity.

brief:

enlarge and hand render a photograph of an interior space

the photograph was provided to us by our lecturer and had to be scaled up from A4 to A2 using a grid.

I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna go see Chuck Close at AMOA!!!!

This freaking ROCKS! Thank you Chuck Close &  Big Bird!
Can’t you tell me how to get to Sesame Street??!!

Among the millions who view the diorama background murals of William Traher every year, only a handful of artists and museum professionals comprehend the magnitude of his accomplishment. Located at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, these murals are so realistic that they might easily be mistaken for photographs. A closer look, however, reveals a mastery of light, composition, and detail reminiscent of the Old Masters. Above all, his artistic vision championed an absolute faithfulness to the visual perspectives, colors, and textures of nature. To realize this vision required superhuman patience and decades of back-breaking labor. The completed murals won the artist international acclaim and now provide a permanent exhibit for all visitors of the Museum to enjoy.

To create the illusion of reality, artist William Traher painted the lower quarters of elephant seals on the floor of the Campbell Island diorama background. His techniques made use of photographic reference materials and projection devices, inspired in part by the use of similar devices by Renaissance artists. He applied acrylic paint in layers using brushes, sponges, rollers, and spray guns. The mural is on permanent display in the South Pacific Hall at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. (Image courtesy of DMNS)

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

It’s fascinating to follow the progress of procedural nature and landscape rendering. Especially because it is such a hard problem and because it involves possibly the most complex geometry one can think of and a plethora of geometries and materials, all things which must be synthesized parametrically rather than fully premodelled.

I don’t know if this shows the state of the art but apparently the program (Vue) involved in the pictures you’re about to see, is used in the movie industry to synthesize (at least quasi-) photorealistic landscapes.

Back in the 80s it was possible for me to run World Construction Set on an Amiga 1200 computer with an FPU accelleration board. It was hopelessly slow though. I imagine if I’d have have the patience to follow through on the first render, it would’ve taken weeks.

Enter 2009 and Vue Infinite. Take a look.

• Stefan Menzel on Vue                                                                        

Things are happening. I look forward to not just real-time raytraced 3D but realtime raytraced 3D procedural nature in my lifetime.

Then couple this with 3D touch and vision and UX as we know it today will become hopelessly pathetic in comparison.

See also

• Vue Infinite
• Terragen
• World Construction Set
• CausticRT
• New Approaches to Complex Dynamics

Black and White Gallery’s current exhibit is characteristically relevant, cutting-edge and well worth a jaunt over to the western fringes of Chelsea. Michael Van den Besselaar provocatively addresses denial and in so doing takes a casual slap at pop art shallowness. Softly photorealistic portraits of vintage television sets from the 70s – two of Asian manufacture, one European – project images of terrorist activity (a hijacked airliner, a helicopter and a trio of Mercedes 240 series sedans) from their grainy black-and-white screens. Eerier still is a set of six Weegee-esque dead womens’ faces. Bonnie Parker, Marilyn Monroe, Mother Teresa, Evita Peron and Rosa Parks are smaller in death than life; the Anna Nicole Smith portrait pans down on her, puffy and lifeless in the purest sense of the word.

Most striking of all is Van den Besselaar’s Lethal Chamber Series. Whether or not these are actual depictions of the rooms where American executioners paralyze and then inject convicts with caustic de-icing chemicals, they’re impossible to turn away from, the curtained white rooms with their gurneys and straps radiating a brutally sarcastic soft-focus light.

Also on display: all-white, lifesize gas masks by Konstantinos Stamatiou; starkly strange cross-stitch-on-canvas figures by Alicia Ross; hip-hop inspired black-and-white collages by Elia Alba and a characteristically devious trio of pitch black “fur geese” sculptures by the irrepressible Jason Clay Lewis (the guy responsible for a recent series of sculptures made out of D-Con rat poison), which might be characterized as the most disturbing items in the entire exhibit

On opening night, the gallery also featured live black-and-white art. Pesu methodically painted a stylized Asian-tinged portrait of a dragon with what appeared to be smiley faces on its back. Those turned out to be scales. To his right, Fernando Mora created a raw, striking, possibly gunsight-view tableau that started out convex and then as he embellished it became just the opposite. Getting your perspective turned inside out after mass quantities of wine is great mind-melting fun – and serves as a vivid reminder of the arduous physical labor that is so often part and parcel of creating first-class art. More galleries should be doing things like this. The current exhibit runs through August 8. Black and White Gallery is at 636 W 28th St., ground floor, hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM and by appointment.

Photorealism as an art movement began in the late 1960’s in United States and Britain; here scenes are painted in a style closely resembling photographs. The word ‘Photorealism’ was coined by Louis K. Meisel in 1968 and it is also labeled as Super-Realism, Magic Real, Sharp Focus, Radical Real, Hyperreal, and Romanic Real.

In Photorealism everything is frozen, obstructed from movement. Change is completely denied.  The real-time objects changes while drawing and only a photo can give a still movement picture. So photorealist collects their imagery and information with the camera and photograph and represents them accurately in canvas. There is no specific subject matter that is being followed. Generally everyday scenes, is portrayed in an extremely detailed, exacting style.  Images are copied directly from the original photograph with only difference being they are larger than the original photographs. Photo realists often use magnified glass. 

Photorealism, the art movement was in its height in the mid-1970s with Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Howard Kanovitz, Charles Bell, Audrey Flack, Robert Bechtle, Don Eddy, Tom Blackwell, Davis Cone, and Robert Cottingham contributing for the growth of the art movement. Also known as Superrealism, the movement was most popular in the United States but spread to some parts of Western Europe. The early 1990s again saw a re-birth of interest in the genre. This artist followed varied and dynamic subject matter like horses, trucks, diners, etc. Richard Estes’ paintings focused mostly in street scenes with elaborate reflections in window-glass.  The colossal portraits of Chuck Close portray expressionless faces.  Blackwell is one of the photorealist most associated with the style. Blackwell has produced a significant body of work based on the shiny metallic objects of motorcycle as well as other vehicles such as airplanes. In the sculpture medium, artist often used casts of the human figure to create true-to-form.

The use of the photo has been a debated topic. Photorealist painting has no existence apart from photographs, yet they are more real than a photo. The style followed is very tight and precise, and ask for high level of technical expertise and skill to create. The indepth understanding of the nature being studied is reflected in the paintings, and moreover each artist has his or her own version of what is real and what is imagined. Photo-realists continue to excite the eye and live off of its own uniqueness.