Richard Estes
Encyclopedia
- For the wildebeest expert, see Richard Despard EstesRichard Despard EstesRichard Despard Estes is a biologist specialising in the behaviour of mammals in mainland Africa. He is particularly interested in studying wildebeest...
.
Richard Estes (born May 14, 1932, Kewanee, Illinois
Kewanee, Illinois
Kewanee is a city in Henry County, Illinois, United States. "Kewanee" is the Winnebago word for prairie chicken, which lekked there. The population was 12,916 at the 2010 census, down from 12,944 at the 2000 census.-Geography:...
) is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
artist, best known for his photorealist
Photorealism
Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic...
painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
s. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city
City
A city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...
and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s, with such painters as Ralph Goings
Ralph Goings
Ralph Goings is an American painter closely associated with the Photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s...
, Chuck Close
Chuck Close
Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits...
, and Duane Hanson
Duane Hanson
Duane Hanson was an American artist based in South Florida but born in Minnesota, a sculptor known for his lifecast realistic works of people, cast in various materials, including polyester resin, fibreglass, Bondo and bronze...
. Author Graham Thompson wrote, "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 (painting)
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...
and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson
Denis Peterson
Denis Peterson is an American hyperrealist painter. He is a 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 of Art, Corcoran MPA and Max Hutchinson Gallery...
, Audrey Flack
Audrey Flack
Audrey Flack is an American photorealist painter, printmaker, and sculptor.Flack studied fine arts in New York from 1948 to 1953. She earned a graduate degree and an honorary doctorate from Cooper Union in New York City, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale University. She studied art history at...
, and Chuck Close
Chuck Close
Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits...
often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs."
Early life
At an early age, Estes moved to ChicagoChicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
with his family, where he studied fine arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1952–56). He frequently studied the works of realist
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
painters such as Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
, Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
, and Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator...
, 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 City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
and, for the next ten years, worked as a graphic artist
Graphic arts
A type of fine art, graphic art covers a broad range of art forms. Graphic art is typically two-dimensional and includes calligraphy, photography, drawing, painting, printmaking, lithography, typography, serigraphy , and bindery. Graphic art also consists of drawn plans and layouts for interior...
for various magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
publishers and advertising agencies
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
in New York and Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
. During this period, he painted in his spare time. He had lived in Spain since 1962 and, by 1966, was financially able to "quit his day job".
Work
Estes stayed true to the photographs: when his paintings included stickers, signs, and window displays, they were always depicted backwards, because of the reflection. His works rarely included litter or snow around the buildings, because he believed these details would detract attention away from the buildings themselves. The settings were always in the daytime, never the nighttime, suggesting "vacant and quiet Sunday mornings." Estes' works strive to create a three-dimensional feel on a two-dimensional canvas. His work has been considered using a variety of terms, ranging from super-realism, sharp-focus realism, neo-realism, photo-realism, to radical realism. The most frequented term is super-realism. Most of Richard's paintings from the early 1960s are of city dwellers engaged in everyday activities. Beginning around 1967, he began to paint storefronts and buildingBuilding
In architecture, construction, engineering, real estate development and technology the word building may refer to one of the following:...
s with glass
Glass
Glass is an amorphous solid material. Glasses are typically brittle and optically transparent.The most familiar type of glass, used for centuries in windows and drinking vessels, is soda-lime glass, composed of about 75% silica plus Na2O, CaO, and several minor additives...
window
Window
A window is a transparent or translucent opening in a wall or door that allows the passage of light and, if not closed or sealed, air and sound. Windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent material like float glass. Windows are held in place by frames, which...
s and, more importantly, the reflected image
Image
An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...
s shown on these windows. The paintings were based on color photograph
Color photography
Color photography is photography that uses media capable of representing colors, which are traditionally produced chemically during the photographic processing phase...
s he would take, which trapped the evanescent nature of the reflections, which would change with the lighting and the time of day. Estes' paintings were based on several photographs of the subject. He avoided using famous New York landmarks. His paintings provided fine detail that were invisible to the naked eye, and gave "depth and intensity of vision that only artistic transformation can achieve." While some amount of alteration was done for the sake of aesthetic composition
Composition (visual arts)
In the visual arts – in particular painting, graphic design, photography and sculpture – composition is the placement or arrangement of visual elements or ingredients in a work of art or a photograph, as distinct from the subject of a work...
, it was important to Estes that the central and the main reflected objects be recognizable, but also that the evanescent quality of the reflections be retained. He had his one-man show in 1968, at the Allan Stone Gallery. His works have also been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, the Whitney Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
. In 1971, Estes was granted a National Council for the Arts fellowship.