Speaking of Art Blog

I realized something this week that hit me, stopped me in my tracks, and made me smack my forehead with the exclamation, “Of course, that’s it, I need to rebrand myself.”

I must backtrack to about a week ago in order to explain.  I was just getting started with this pastel painting.

Scarlet Tanager, pastel, 9x12" 

The red and black were giving me fits.  The red in my reference photo kept shouting at me, which is the effect I wanted because that’s what a Scarlet Tanager’s red coloring does, it’s LOUD RED when you look at it.  The black wings and tail gave me fits for a totally different reason.  There was so much detail which I wanted to include that was INSIDE that wing, but how would I do that?  The solution for the believable red came when I started to play around with lots of shades of super neon red all layered together.  For the black wing I followed a hunch which turned out to be the best answer.  I worked on small successive sections by first defining the details with a hard charcoal pencil, then a medium charcoal pencil, then a navy-blue pastel pencil, and then finally a black pastel pencil.  Leaving any of those steps out caused the effect to come up short.  I wanted fluffy looking detailed black feathers.  Bingo, I got it.

While I was working on this painting, I was mulling over a recent comment made by a fellow realistic styled artist friend of mine.  They identified themselves as a hyperrealist.  Hmm, what is hyperrealism and how is it different from photorealism?  Is there a difference?  If so, what style of artwork is mine, hyperrealism or photorealism?

I can’t tell you how many times in recent years onlookers have studied my artwork and exclaimed, “Wow, that looks like a photograph!”  I’ve actually always considered that a compliment.  Yes, that is my goal, to make it look so real that it’s practically indistinguishable from a photo.  And yet, there is one big difference between my work and a photo.  My artwork does not look like the photograph I started with; it just doesn’t.  It goes beyond the photo.  I want to capture my subject’s essence, its core, its reality, that hard-to-describe element that makes it look so 3-dimensional that it looks like it’s going to come right off the paper.  Does a photo look like that?  Not quite.  Even when I use my really good Nikon camera with shots in perfect lighting, my darks are a little too dark, my lights are a little too bleached out, and the details in some crucial spots are non-existent.  And those empty places are where I fill in the blanks when I do a pastel painting. I tweak and add to and refine those areas to tell the complete story, the whole real-life picture.

So today I did some research online to find out if there is a difference between hyperrealism and photorealism.  Yes, there is a difference.  Photorealism is more descriptive.  It includes all the details you see in a photo, while hyperrealism imitates reality.  Description is not the only goal of hyperrealism; instead, capturing something’s essence is more important.  Aha, epiphany time.  I’m a hyperrealist, not a photorealist.  That’s why I took the time to figure out what shades of red were in that Scarlet Tanager and then I used ALL OF THEM.  That’s why I was determined to successfully create a very detailed yet totally black wing that juts forward from the bird's body.  I was after the bird’s 3-D essence and my photo came up short in some spots.  As usual, I had to go online and study a ton of pics of Scarlet Tanagers to fill in the missing puzzle pieces.  (Google is amazing.  I don’t know how I would do without it.)

Wow, time to rebrand myself.  My style is hyperrealism.  And in the future if someone tells me that my painting “looks like a photograph”, I will still thank them for the compliment, but then I will be sure to add that my goal is to go beyond the photo.  My goal is hyperrealism, capturing my subject’s real-life essence.  Or as my husband usually says as he holds my reference photo in his hand and glances at my finished painting, “Dang, that’s way better than the photo.  It looks so real.”  Music to my ears.