Woolhouses Scrapyard WIP

Agree with Syd - and this is brilliant work.

Looks good to me. Did I see your name listed as a prize winner somewhere?

Congratulations - well deserved!

It's looking wonderful Anth, so clever.

And wonderful it looks, just seen it on the gallery.

To attempt to deal with Davide19's point - Why is it that so many 'artists' appear to think that the quick and often slapdash work produced in minutes is worthy of sustained attention by the viewer? - and without jumping straight through the thin ice I hope (though just watch me) I think the culprit in the first instance was Impressionism: that's why so many established artists at the time, and even more art critics, loathed it so much; and why John Ruskin, who was a very careful and meticulous artist, accused Whistler of "throwing a paint-pot in the public's face" (quotation might be a little off). They could not then understand or adapt to paintings which strove for a general impression, rather than a strict and accurate record. Today, the great majority of broadly figurative artists follow the Impressionistic approach - probably most of us do; and are praised (usually, when it comes off) for a "painterly" attitude, for the quality of brushwork (which historically, there were exceptions like Rembrandt, was prized chiefly for being invisible: hence Constable's studies for his finished paintings, which are often more highly prized by artists than the finished, careful work: his brushwork in those studies excites many of us today, but he wouldn't have been able to sell them at the time - at least not before he became famous). Impressionism overthrew all that, and was the forerunner of ever more advanced/extreme painting techniques and abstraction. But there have always been painters who wanted accuracy and saw artistic value in closely realistic studies (realistic in the sense that they corresponded to what was seen, anyway; all painting is an illusion, of course). There are some, maybe not many, who use the pre-Impressionist old master approach, whom acrylic and alkyd painting have really liberated - it's made a return to those methods more possible and, up to a point, easy - not that the accurate painting and drawing is easy, but you don't have to wait around forever while layers of paint dry: the materials are easier to use for this technique, that's all. People get bored by strictly photographic imagery, in which you genuinely can't tell a painting from a photograph, because it can often be extremely boring to look at - the texture ironed out, the tones very similar to those of a photo with none of the subtlety that paint offers if you let it. But compare that observation to Anth Knight's painting above - it doesn't apply, does it? It didn't even occur to me to wonder whether it was "photorealistic" or not - I suppose it is, if that matters - because it's still obviously a painting: composed, colourful, AND subtle: it's not just a picture postcard translated into paint: that's what's given photorealism a bad name, that and an obsession with detail which can become an end in itself and swamp a painting by distracting the eye rather than leading it to where the artist wants it to go. Look again at Anth's painting - obsession with detail? No - absolutely not; there's enough so that you can read the picture; you know you're in a breaker's yard, you know these cars, once proudly owned, are on their way to the crusher: it works on many levels: it's detailed, but it hasn't let detail run away with itself and detract from the strength of the image. Maybe in other words - if you do photorealistic painting badly, even if technically competently but artistically badly, you'll fail; if you do it well both in terms of accuracy and artistry, you'll succeed. To dismiss a whole genre on the basis of a few dud paintings is daft, whatever the genre might be.