/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>3859518
Because they had no photos yet.

Joke aside: because the ones paying for paintings didn't want photorealism, they wanted an embelishment of reality. No one wants to pay an artist so that he draws you looking like your ugly self.

>>3859522
>Because they had no photos yet.
>Joke aside
What joke? It's fucking true lol.

'cuz they didn't have photos

>>3859522
>>3859524
>>3859526
How does that matter?

Drawing a tree or a cup doesn't need photos

somebody post the "Mike and Angelo" pasta

>>3859531
Go out and draw me a photorealist tree.

Oh no you spent more than 0.1 second and the wind blew up the leaves. You have to start all over again.
Oh no, you spent more than 10 minutes, the lighting totally changed, you have to start all over again.

The key point to make a photorealist drawing is that you must have enough time to go into autistic level of details, with a model that doesn't change at all. It just doesn't happen in real life with no photos

probably because they didn't have photos.

>>3859538
How about a cup? Or a bowl of fruit? Or a book? Or a stuffed toy? Etc etc etc

Your argument fails

>>3859544
My argument doesn't fail because LIGHTING change. Except if you can make the sun stand still long enough, I guess.

>>3859556
What about drawing things by candlelight, anon?

>>3859556
Hurr because dark rooms with candles don't exist!

>>3859522
Are you saying that drawing of Robin Williams is ugly?

>>3859558
candles as a reliable, sufficient and constant source of light?
please no.

>>3859531
Because photorealism requires photographic reference. It's miserably time-consuming, and no one wants to sit in a chair for hours so that you can copy every single hair on their head. Not to mention, photorealism is really only possible in a relatively efficient way using dry media like colored pencils, and colored pencils didn't have their wide variety of color until very recently.

>>3859518
surely, if a photorealism artist did a lot of these copy exercises, a huge skill gained from that can also be used to draw from imagination? if drawing skill is made up mostly of muscle memory, then even if they draw from imagination, they're going to get the feel of when something is not right or not realistic-looking enough.

what they did is about 100x harder than "photorealism" and was based on abstractions unlike just copying a photograph

>>3859558
>>3859561
once you were done with a painting with both the subject and itself illuminated with candle light that you supposedly kept consistent for 10+ hours, if you took it outside it would look completely out of whack
did you ever try painting with f.lux on?

>>3859531
having a photo would help photorealistic study tremendously
>>3859558
and mostly artists can't keep their heads and eyes consistently the same angle on the subjects which would hold little problem when you have a photo
but yes well still life painting were pretty near photorealistic

>>3859518
Vermeer

>>3859558
>>3859561
When’s the last time you painted trad in the dark?

>>3859926
last night

people are missing the point... the old masters did practice "realism", but they didn't have literal photos to compare to on pixel perfect levels, so as far as they (and any of their fans) could tell, they were reaching what we now call photorealism.

they did the best they could

>>3859518
because today we can do the grid method with 12 mega pixels, but they could only use a 3x3 grid.

Technology is amazing

>>3859969
asides from the awful fucking drip stains i actually really like this. the silhouetted tree in the mess of strokes looks genuinely neat.
t. modern "art" appreciator

>>3859518
They got pretty damn close.

Hans Holbein did it a two hundred years before the camera.

>>3860714

>>3860717

>>3860718

Photorealism is pseudo art for masses, that are unable to see in an artwork anything beyond the actual paint on canvas and amount of detail. Basically - the more photo-like the less soul.
This >>3860687
Is much better than any photorealism.

>>3859562
Ya...it's pretty terrible.

>>3861025
But why?

>>3861030
artistic equivalent of an acoustic ukelele cover of a Biggie song.

>photorealistic
>no photos
Nigga your retarded
Only way someone could do a photorealistic image back then would be if they had perfect photographic memory that lasted for several hours which is pretty much impossible

>>3860687
>>3860717
As much as I like those two, who are the two more realistic examples, I wouldn't qualify them as "photorealist" or even attempting to be.

Like all art from their period, they are dead full of symbolism. Every element is there for a purpose and fills a role.

It's not taking a photo, it's a deliberate creation and composition of a scene, that just so happen to be more realistic than the average painting.

>>3859518
becausw the masters knew that art was an obversation of life, not an exact copy of it

>>3861187
Indeed.

>>3859518
I'm not well versed in art history but IIRC it's just because the Renaissance method of construction wasn't that great on accuracy, and when the Dutch masters started using comparative measurement they quickly realized it was more efficient and precise.
Also in "Color and Light", James Gurney says that scientific discoveries helped a lot with understanding light and "unlocked" certain things in painting.
You should also account for the old masters's pigments being all faded at this point, the colors were much more vivid.

There's so much confounding confusion about art in this thread that I don't even know where to begin correcting you guys

>>3859562
It's not about that. Old kings and queens would deliberately ask the artist to make them more beautiful than they really were, because a ruler's fairness had to be both spiritual and physical. However, with time, artists just stopped doing that and started painting them as the inbred fucks they really were.

>>3862652
Which not only takes arrogance, but a profound sense of self and boatloads of 16th century chutzpah to say "Listen I know I don't look the best, but could you pretty it up for me?"

In the age of Youtubers and Twitch E-Girls who are only and easily successful by being the absolute idyll of beauty and vapidity, we could honestly use a little Renaissance self-awareness. There's divine beauty in all of us, and an awareness of what physical Earthly beauty is, it's only in the 21st century that we've begun to REWARD people for genetics.

Ugly people know they're ugly, it just flat out didn't matter back then.

>>3862667
Add onto that the profound nerve of women who used to be so stupid they were only useful as models for art, now saying "We're actually artists too" and you have the perfect conditions for art to be as in the shitter as it is now.

Globally people have decided that in order to create something beautiful, you yourself must be beautiful. Vincent Van Gogh would kill himself all over again.

>>3859531
P H O T Orealism literally can't exist before photos lol

>>3859518
Drawing from imagination is argueably more difficult than drawing from a refernence. You need to also consider that art techniques werent as refined at that point.

There was no particular schools or institutions back then for the old masters to learn the fundamentals because they MADE the fundementals.

So the fact that the old masters even understood art at that level is fucking incredible. My nigga DaVinci had to literally unearth corpses just so that he could understand anatomy.

>>3859518
there were no photos and also they knew that there are more important things for the painting than the details

>>3861032
Well you sure as fuck know a whole alot about art as a whole don't you? Why don't you show me your "ideal" portrait so I can shit all over it?

>>3863539
not that anon but if you like the garbage in the OP you have absolute shit taste and possibly brain damage.