Oil painting -> List of Painters -> Richard Estes
Richard Estes
Early Days: |
Career:
Most of Richard's paintings from the early 1960s are of city dwellers engaged in everyday activities. Beginning around 1967, Richard began to paint storefronts and buildings with glass windows, and more importantly, the reflected images shown on these windows. The paintings were based on color photographs he would take, which trapped the evanescent nature of the reflections, which would change in part with the lighting and the time of day. While some amount of alteration was done for the sake of aesthetic composition, it was important to Richard that the central and the main reflected objects be recognizable, but also that the evanescent quality of the reflections be retained. Richard had his first of many one-man shows in 1968, at the Allan Stone Gallery.
His works have also been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Solomocn R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1971, Richard was granted a National Council for the Arts fellowship. Estes' paintings commonly represented past abstractions, hence the photorealistic qualities they portray.