I came across the site of one Ralph Goings, an American Photorealist Painter, and I couldn’t stop stop myself from flipping through the images he has of his work. If you don’t know what photorealism is, here is a little blurb to get you up to speed:

Photorealists very consciously took their cues from photographic images, often working very systematically from photographic slide projections onto canvases and using techniques such as gridding to preserve accuracy. The photorealist style is tight and precisionistic, often with an emphasis on imagery that require a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate, such as reflections in specular surfaces and the geometric rigor of man-made environs.

In essense, the painter uses a select set of tools and techniques to paint a photograph onto the canvas. Like many other Photorealists, Goings has the ability to take something as mundane and commonplace as a ketchup bottle and use the canvas to make it come alive and look like something new and fresh. I challenge you all to take a minute or so to take a look at his work and see how amazing it really is. It took me a while to find a painting that actually looked like a painting and not a photograph.

If you are interested, a few other famous photorealists are: Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle, Audrey Flack, Robert Cottingham, and Don Eddy

Enjoy.