I don’t get the obsession with photorealism in visual art. Sure, it’s impressive on a technical level, but what’s the point? Wow! It looks just like the subject! So… why not just look at the subject, then? Or an actual photo of it.
Show me something I haven’t seen before.
It would be like a sculptor who spends hundreds of hours creating a chair that looks exactly like a chair but is too fragile to sit on. What is there to celebrate besides the expenditure of a human’s time?
If a person can produce photorealism with pencils, that’s a nifty skill. But if that’s all they’re doing, they’re really just a visual technician producing something that isn’t any more interesting to look at than the subject itself.
The only way to show me something I haven’t seen before is to fuck with reality by warping it with your artistic process. Reality distilled through human experience becomes something beyond reality.
That’s interesting.
Muse Vassal 