What artist used Photo-Realism in still life compositions that often related to

Question:

What artist used Photo-Realism in still life compositions that often related to family themes?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

I think you may mean Janet Fish. "Some artists in the 1970s painted in a style called Photo Realism. Photo Realists like Janet Fish, Chuck Close and Richard Estes saw the world through the lens of a camera. Janet Fish never considered herself a Photo Realist, but her complex still lifes seem to have been influenced by photography. Fish thinks of herself as a 'painterly realist.' She is interested in light, atmosphere, motion and lush, saturated color. Her paintings are full of color and seem to have a life of their own. Highlights, shadows and pattern fill her canvasses." [1]

Fish specializes in still lifes, and her subjects are often drawn from the home and are related to food, place settings, floral arrangements and the like that one would find in art work centered on home and family.

Strictly speaking, I am not sure that Fish is a photo-realist in the definition one might base upon the work of Chuck Close: "Unlike the many forms of realism that tend to celebrate the visible world and the remarkable abilities of the painter's eye, Photo Realism is essentially critical. It raises questions about the way we see and reminds us of the many physical and psychological factors that alter, compensate, or diminish the things we look at. These artists do not present photographs as a more truthful way of seeing, but as a means of understanding more about what we do see. Photo Realism is not only unconcerned with realism, it is actively involved with artificiality. Those artists who use the camera as something more than a translation device—and they are the only ones who may accurately be called Photo Realists—are aware of its shortcomings and distortions, and gladly make use of them to expand the vocabulary of art." [2]

Close, perhaps the most interesting and certainly the best known of the photo-realists focused almost exclusively on portraits, often self-portraits. They combine abstract expression with representational realism through the abstract designs that fill the grid. These reproduce the details of photography, usually black and white. But he has experimented in a number of forms. My favorite of his work is the collage of his daughter Georgia. It "assaults the viewer with its imposing scale [56" x 45"] and texture, but also poses a paradox because of the sensitive familial intimacy with which the portrait was nurtured." [3]

Estes, on the other hand, "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."

Other than Fish, I cannot think of a photo-realist known for still life compositions related to family themes.