Art Chowder September | October 2017, Issue 11 | Page 40

The problem with
“REALISM”
BY MELVILLE HOLMES
“Why didn’t great painters of the
past reach the level of realism
achieved today by many artists?”
S
o runs the title to a thread on the
sophisticated question-and-answer net-
working website Quora. Just below this
provocative question is a highly realistic
looking head shot of a pretty young
woman, eyes closed, mouth open, tongue
curling sensuously at the corner of her
mouth to taste a viscous, golden liquid
dripping down her face. What isn’t noted
on the Quora 1 site is that the picture,
entitled California Dreamin (2015), is
part of the “honey series” of portraits by
German hyperrealist artist Mike Dargas
(b. 1983), where supermodel Toni Garrn
is depicted wearing bright red lipstick,
with honey flowing over various facial
expressions, and that the actual painting
measures 75 x 55”!
The Photograph has popularly become
the measure of the “realness” of an
image: the more a drawing or painting
resembles a photograph the more truthful
it seems, and the more highly the artist’s
skill is often rated. (“Wow! It looks
like a photograph!”) An article in GQ
magazine 2 covering a 2016 exhibition of
the artist’s work in London opens in this
way, “Admit it, you thought that was a
photo didn’t you?…Pixels? Not quite,
that’s all oil paint.”
Photo credit: Sean Davis via Visualhunt.com
40 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE
That is partly true because these imag-
es, reminiscent of the much larger face
portraits by photorealist Chuck Close
in the 1970s, are made of meticulously
applied oil color, now using very high
resolution digital images instead of film
photographs. Neither style is based on
classical drawing, of course. Instead, a
photographic image is transferred direct-
ly onto the canvas with the help of a grid
or a projector. Photos of Dargas’ work in
progress reveal no grid lines, but finely
detailed pencil outlines can be seen in
areas not yet painted in, suggesting that