It's interesting to see his work improve over the years. I imagine the improvement is in part from the advancements in photography equipment.
What I don't understand is how anyone can draw/paint anything that realistic. Especially his most recent work. I doubt I would even be able to tell had I not know that wasn't a photo.
As to technique: I expect he's using a modern version of camera obscura or similar, using e.g. a projector slide (i.e. non-negative negative) for a base.
Agreed 100%. I'm also not a fan of photorealism, but I believe that other posters in this thread are underestimating the skill of the artist. Especially now that I realize that he is working in watercolor, which doesn't easily allow the kind of layering that you can do in acrylic or oil.
That is disappointing. This means that the "vision of American life" is not in the artist's head per-se, but is just a photo. He's got talent like a talented photographer to see the scene, frame it, and photograph it, and talent in his hands to be a "human developing machine". These are impressive to be sure, but the spark that allows great artists to paint things the way they perceive them (or would like to) is missing in this technique.
I suspect that he does a lot of catchup bottles because he's "got that down" and its become easy for him.
It was some time after I became seriously interested in photography that I realized framing is a myth. Bad or amateur photographers look at a poorly framed result and regretfully discard it. Experienced ones cut triangles off the sides - or nowadays, straighten it up in Photoshop or Picasa. If you enjoy photography you might find it well worth revisiting your discard box.
The myth persists partly because in film and video, the frame is a much harder limit and requires a far greater commitment on the part of the person looking through the lens at the time the image is recorded...we do mess about with it in post-production, of course, but with far less freedom than a still photographer enjoys.
Don't be too harsh on the absence of the artistic 'spark'. Even magnificent artists like Durer employed grids to aid with proportion and perspective, and composed complex pictures by making numerous studies of posed models first. Much historical art would have been viewed as a matter of skill rather than talent by its creators, with the art stemming from the selective emphasis rather than a faithful rendering.
I agree with you about the ketchup bottles though. The body of work on display here seems singularly unadventurous in its choice of subject matter.
Painting through projections is actually still quite difficult. Remember that what you see on the canvas is a lighted projection, and not true to the original photograph's color. What the projection can be useful for is retaining the proper proportions and locations of a highly detailed photo. The real skill involved here comes from being able to reproduce the color (the way they are shaped / blended) and paint without leaving any evidence of the brush.
Note: I have been painting / drawing for about 18 years and while I thoroughly enjoy the challenges of drawing (finding correct proportions / locations, creating volumous shapes through line), I find the process utterly tedious and boring while working on a painting. The reason I picked the brush up in the first place was to get away from the pencil.
My wife is a painter; she tells me that it is actually pretty typical for modern painters to project an image on to canvas rather than paint from a print. An image that is painted from a print tends to be flatter and an image painted from a projection tends to have more depth.
It's a shame that he doesn't paint something more compelling than ketchup. Photographers can create truly astonishing work based only on what they get through a lens. With his technique he could produce even more impressive and thought-provoking images, and that would be worth much more artistically, IMO.
I have a kind of half-formed theory that despite the fact that so many people like art based on the "wow, it looks so real" factor - it's actually the extent to which it DOESN'T look real, but still references reality that it's impressive.
In this particular work, there's kind of a glowing, excruciating detail that you don't get from photos, or from looking at those kinds of objects normally. Artwork would have to be pretty boring to really "look real."
My college art teacher told me these are done by taking a photo, making a slide out of it, and projecting that slide onto the canvas.
Apparently some of the old master painter used a camera obscura and one might have even nudged his in the middle of a painting thus moving one of the ears way out whack in the final painting.
I can't be bothered to google it right now.
And I'm not accusing this guy of doing it that way, but how would you know?
That, or projecting it next to the canvas and copying. I don't object to this technique (in fact, I'm learning towards doing something similar for an art project I have in mind), but my first reaction to the work of this artist is that it's banal and suggests a refusal or fear of engaging with the subject in any meaningful way.
I'm a shy person myself and can relate to not wanting to snap a photo or sketch overtly, but 'here's what some people look like when they don't know you're staring' isn't revealing very much of anything.
If you like the hyper-realitic painterly technique but (like me) prefer a more provocative application of it, you may share my enjoyment of Istvan Sandorfi: http://www.fosaw.com/ I can't afford any of his art, but I have spent a few hundred bucks on buying the catalogs.
What I don't understand is how anyone can draw/paint anything that realistic. Especially his most recent work. I doubt I would even be able to tell had I not know that wasn't a photo.