Hello, my dear art lovers! Since we haven’t had an drawing-related article for a long while, I thought of presenting you one of my latest drawings today. This will also give me the occasion to introduce you into the genre of art called ‘hyperrealism‘.
Unfortunately, hyperrealism, which has come into life quite recently, is often criticized due to a misunderstanding of this term. It is vital to understand it properly before accusing this genre of lack of artistic expression, creativity or anything else. Let’s see together what this is all about!
Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high-resolution photograph, which has developed mainly in Europe and America since the beginning of the 21th century. What makes it different from the previous art genre called ‘photorealism’ is the fact that hyperrealism shows details more accurately than a photograph or sometimes even more than how the object is perceived in reality by the human eye.
Even though the reference source for a hyperrealistic artwork is a photograph, the artist creates a more definitive and detailed rendering of the object, often depicting emotional states and promoting moral messages. Therefore, the artwork not only reproduces reality, but it goes beyond the over-all pictorial image, insisting on details so as to enhance its subtle message and expressivity, the ones that we often fail to notice without taking a closer look to the amazing world we live in.
Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are not strict interpretations of photographs, nor are they literal illustrations of a particular scene or subject. Instead, they utilize additional, often subtle, pictorial elements to create the illusion of a reality which in fact either does not exist or cannot be seen by the human eye.
To understand this fact better, the following two pictures show the differences between the reference photo and the pencil drawing:
The great art critic and philosopher Hippolyte Taine stated in his amazing book ‘The philosophy of art’ that ‘art should not be made with the intention of tricking human senses’. But hyperrealism does not do this, its main aim being to enrich the human senses with a new experience of detail, with a new approach to the reality, not surreal, but showing up the reality that cannot be completely depicted by photography, the real features, but enhanced by the human spirit.
Below, you can find some great sources if you want to find out more about this genre, which, in my opinion, will play a vital role in the future of art:
Further on, as you already got used to when it comes to a drawing presentation, I will post some pictures of the evolution of my hyperrealistic eye drawing. Please let me know your opinion about this work. I hope you’ll enjoy it!
July 24, 2015 @ 7:27 PM
Truly beautiful work! This is my favorite form, though it takes me 30 – 40 hours to get it right, usually 🙂 Thanks for the informative article! Maybe someday I can stop cringing when someone says "it looks just like a photo!" Lol…
November 17, 2013 @ 7:06 PM
Thank you for your appreciation! I spend around 15 hours on this piece 🙂
November 15, 2013 @ 7:05 PM
Really beautiful work. How many hours did you put into drawing this?