Richard Estes

Richard Estes (born May 14, 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois) is an American artist, best known for his photorealist paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist hobby of the late 1960s, with such painters as John Baeder, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, and Duane Hanson. Author Graham Thompson writes "One distress of the pretentiousness photography became assimilated into the art world is the triumph of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and into the future 1970s. It is pseudonym super-realism or hyper-realism and painters considering Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to Make paintings that appeared to be photographs."