Information

• Echinacea 1

  February, 2022

  watercolor

  12 x 8.5 inches

  Portfolio Updates

Statement

• Here is a small painting of an Echinacea flower. I am intrigued by the problem of realism in painting. To me, realism is a philosophical conundrum. Reality is a unified field of paradoxes. When many artists think of realism, we think of duplicating what our eyes see. How limiting that is. The skill to model what one sees in paint is an academic marker of achievement, but it can become an addiction. It becomes easy to lose sight of talking about the problem of what reality is or could be.

  In this painting, I mainly focused on visual perceptions of what you might see. Even if someone were painting what they saw, it would be difficult to ignore distortions in light, color, and myodesopsias (those annoying eye floaters). I've had friends talk about seeing RGB (reg, green, blue) light dots in a dark room, seemingly simulating the rods and cones of the retina. So, it's hard to ignore how much our eyes resemble a camera. I've embellished on some of those distortions in this painting.

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