Richard Estes

 

American Painter Richard Estes has made a career out of fooling the eye. When I first googled Richard Estes I found it hard to believe that this image I selected titled "Diner" was painted on an oil canvas and was not a photograph. This oil painting was done in 1971 and looks too realistic to be true in my personal opinion. Estes uses photography as a starting point for his paintings. He goes out and takes dozens of photographs of the same thing from different angles, then he cuts, pastes, and manipulates the pictures. Then at his easel, he tries to make his paintings as close to the images as possible.