Richard Estes (born May 14, 1932 in
Kewanee, Illinois
Kewanee () is a city in Henry County, Illinois, United States. "Kewanee" is the Winnebago word for greater prairie chicken, which lived there. The population was 12,509 at the 2020 census, down from 12,944 in 2000.
Geography
According to the ...
) is an American artist, best known for his
photorealist
Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term ca ...
painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...
s. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate
city
A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...
and
geometric landscapes
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the p ...
. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s, with such painters as
John Baeder,
Chuck Close
Charles Thomas Close (July 5, 1940 – August 19, 2021) was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits using a very l ...
,
Robert Cottingham,
Audrey Flack,
Ralph Goings
Ralph Goings (May 9, 1928 – September 4, 2016) was an American painter closely associated with the Photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was best known for his highly detailed paintings of hamburger stands, pick-up trucks ...
, and
Duane Hanson. Author Graham Thompson writes "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or
hyper-realism
Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high-resolution photograph. Hyperrealism is considered an advancement of photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily app ...
and painters like Richard Estes,
Denis Peterson
Denis Peterson (born New York, 1944) is an American hyperrealist painter whose photorealist works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Tate Modern, Springville Museum o ...
, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs."
Early life
At an early age, Estes moved to
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
with his family, where he studied
fine arts at
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a Private university, private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which grew ...
(1952–56). He frequently studied the works of
realist painters such as
Edgar Degas,
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.
Hopper created subdued drama ...
, and
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (; July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important American artists.
For the length ...
, who are strongly represented in the Art Institute's collection. After he completed his course of studies, Estes moved to
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
and, for the next ten years, worked as a
graphic artist for various
magazine publishers and
advertising agencies
An advertising agency, often referred to as a creative agency or an ad agency, is a business dedicated to creating, planning, and handling advertising and sometimes other forms of promotion and marketing for its clients. An ad agency is generally ...
in New York and
Spain
, image_flag = Bandera de España.svg
, image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg
, national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond")
, national_anthem = (English: "Royal March")
, i ...
. During this period, he painted in his spare time. He had lived in Spain since 1962 and, by 1966, was financially able to paint full-time.
Work
Estes stayed true to the photographs he used: when his paintings include stickers, signs, and window displays, they are always depicted backwards because of the reflection. His work rarely included litter or snow around the buildings because he believed these details detract from the buildings themselves. The paintings are always in daylight, suggesting "vacant and quiet Sunday mornings." Estes' works strive to create convincing three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional canvas. His work has been described in terms ranging from super-realism, sharp-focus realism, neo-realism, photo-realism, to radical realism. The most common one is super-realism. Estes' paintings from the early 1960s are typically city dwellers engaged in everyday activities. Around 1967, he began to paint storefronts and
building
A building, or edifice, is an enclosed structure with a roof and walls standing more or less permanently in one place, such as a house or factory (although there's also portable buildings). Buildings come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and fu ...
s with
glass
Glass is a non-crystalline, often transparent, amorphous solid that has widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optics. Glass is most often formed by rapid cooling ( quenching ...
window
A window is an opening in a wall, door, roof, or vehicle that allows the exchange of light and may also allow the passage of sound and sometimes air. Modern windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent mat ...
s and their reflected
images. The paintings were based on Estes'
color photograph
Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associa ...
s, which captured the evanescence of the reflections, changing with the lighting and the time of day.
Estes paintings were based on multiple photographs of the subject. He avoided famous New York landmarks. His paintings provided fine details that were invisible to the naked eye, and gave "depth and intensity of vision that only artistic transformation can achieve."
While some alteration was done for the sake of
aesthetic composition
Composition or Compositions may refer to:
Arts and literature
*Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography
*Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include v ...
, it was important to Estes that the central and the main reflected objects be recognizable, and that the evanescent quality of the reflections be preserved.
He had a one-man show in 1968 at the
Allan Stone Gallery. His works have been exhibited at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
, the
Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...
, the
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum (in Spanish, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (), named after its founder), or simply the Thyssen, is an art museum in Madrid, Spain, located near the Prado Museum on one of the city's main boulevards. I ...
, and the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...
. In 1971, Estes was granted a National Council for the Arts fellowship. The same year, he was elected into the
National Academy of Design
The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the f ...
as an Associate member, and he became a full Academician in 1984.
Notes
External links
Paintings by Richard EstesRichard Estes Artwork Examples on AskART.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Estes, Richard
1932 births
20th-century American painters
American male painters
21st-century American painters
Living people
School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni
People from Kewanee, Illinois
Photorealist artists
Painters from Illinois
20th-century American printmakers
20th-century American male artists
21st-century American male artists
National Academy of Design members