One Point Perspective Island Coast High School 2014

Perspective and Richard Estes ABOUT THE ARTIST Richard Estes was born in 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois, but moved to Chicago at an early age. He remained there to study at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s, where his training centered on figure drawing and traditional academic painting, the style that interested him most. The Art Institute's comprehensive art collection was important in shaping Estes's work; he frequently studied the works of such artists as Edgar Degas, Edward Hopper, and Thomas Eakins there. Upon graduating in 1956, Estes moved to New York, working in the graphic design field as a freelance illustrator and for various magazine publishers and advertising agencies. Estes continued to paint at night and was eventually able to pursue his career as a fulltime artist. Most of Estes's figurative canvases from the early 1960s are painted scenes of New Yorkers engaged in urban activities. Around 1967 his paintings of city street scenes changed to images of glass storefronts reflecting distorted images of buildings and cars. Basing his compositions on his own color photographs, he painted freehand, subtly altering the details for aesthetic balance but keeping the buildings and locations recognizable. In 1968, his first one-person show opened at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. Estes is one of the foremost proponents of the Photo-Realist movement, a particular type of realism characterized by high finish, sharp details, and a photographic appearance. This movement began in the mid-1960s in America with such artists as Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close, Duane Hanson and Estes. Photo-Realism evolved from two longstanding art-historical traditions: trompe l'oeil ("to fool the eye") painting and the meticulous technique and highly finished surfaces of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Painters such as Vermeer greatly influenced Estes with their detailed observation of reality and their use of technical devices, such as the camera obscura. More modern precedents for Estes's painting can be found in the work of Charles Sheeler and the American Precisionist painters of the 1930s, who often used photographic sources to ensure accuracy of line and form.

Perspective and Richard Estes ABOUT THE ART The crisp clarity of Estes's paintings is reminiscent of photography, yet upon closer inspection his work reveals elements and perspectives that do not exist in reality. Waverly Place is one of Estes's "panoramas," or wide-angled views of buildings and streets. For this and other works made after 1974, he used panoramic cameras with special lenses to solve problems of perspective and distortion. By combining two or more such photographs, he created an image showing a junction of streets from several viewpoints at once. Most of Estes's art consists of scenes of New York City that focus on the built environment rather than the natural; they are usually obscure locations rather than well-known landmarks. Estes chose to present isolated buildings, urban street scenes, escalators, subway cars, and distorted reflections seen in shop windows and shiny automobiles. His compositions are typically devoid of people and therefore convey a sense of somber isolation without narrative. Although the illusionistic effect of Estes's paintings suggests they are directly copied from one photographic source, an Estes painting is, in fact, a composite of several photographic views of the same subject. He is not concerned with recreating exact copies of photographs, but rather in manipulating and reconstructing them to create a view that, although scientifically inaccurate, appears more truthful to the eye than reality. Waverly Place depicts an intersection of streets in Greenwich Village. An unnatural hush seems to fall over the scene. There are no people in the painting, and the cars are motionless, parked at the curbs. Estes's empty cityscapes evoke feelings of estrangement and isolation reminiscent of Edward Hopper's and George Segal's works. The perspective is defined by the streets as they angle away from the observer-a view that does not exist in reality. Yet the perspective, buildings, and cars are only slightly altered, and a part of urban New York is transformed into a carefully composed montage of a neighborhood.

Richard Estes Artwork “Waverly Place”

Richard Estes Artwork

One PointPerspective

Perspective Project Objective: To create a cityscape Cityscape will be in one point perspective You will use drawing paper, a pencil, ruler, and colored pencils Your cityscape MUST contain multiple buildings

Perspective Project One Point Perspective City

Student Examples

Demonstration