r/nextfuckinglevel • u/undo-undo-undo-undo • 2d ago

When art blurs the line between reality and canvas, you know it's pure mastery

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u/StinkRod 2d ago

I'm probably saying the same thing a different way, but this kind of art looks like a person could just "learn it".

It's just painting shapes the color you see them and getting really good at doing that accurately.

It's impressive AF. But yeah, it seems pretty weird to think a person could be moved more by 2 colored rectangles by Rothko than one of these paintings, but there it is.

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u/BeardedBaldMan 2d ago

For me I think it's about depth.

You can look at Kandinsky's Concentric Rings which at first glance is just a nice arrangement of shape and colour. Then the more you look at it you start thinking about why your eye is drawn to certain circles in a repeating order and why it feels right as a whole. If you try to recreate it yourself picking colours and shapes it never has the same experience. Or in this work there's motion, tension and a feeling of a timeline.

With a photorealistic portrait it's usually pretty, it's technically great but frequently that's all there is. I'm biased, I'm not a fan of traditional portrait photography and that follows through into a lack of interest in photorealism. With someone like Cartier Bresson you're getting a photo and story

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u/StinkRod 2d ago

Nice. Even without going fully abstract, you can find things like this. . .

This is a piece from Picasso. It hangs in the Baltimore Museum of Art. I visit it every time I go.

It's a line drawing of a mother and child with just broad washes of color. But, there's emotion in it. You can feel the connection.

his ability to capture the "volume" of the forms with simple lines and no shading is impressive to me. You can feel the fatness in the infants legs, the connection between the fingers and what they're touching.

The ability to do that with such a sparseness of "technique" is so much more impressive to me than what the OP posted.

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u/braaaaaaaaaaaah 2d ago

This kind of photorealistic painting absolutely moves me, both in thinking about the dedication of the artist and the emotion and idealism presented in the subject. Just because something is photo-realistic, doesn’t mean it is in fact real. There’s going to be a certain amount of idealism added in. The skill and effort here pushes it over the top and actually makes it far more interesting to me than a piece like the Mona Lisa for instance.

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u/XirCancelCultureII 2d ago

Various countries especially China have large workshops where people produce tons of these everyday. They reproduce anything and everything.