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Richard Estes is an american painter born in 1936
in Illinois.  who is best known for his
hyper-realistic art.  The paintings consist of
reflective, clean, illustrative, inanimate city
and geometric landscapes.

Richard Estes is regarded as one of the founders
of the international Photo-Realist movement of the
late 1960s and 70s, together with painters like
Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close and Duane Hanson.
Their work exhibits a high finish, fine details
and an almost photographic fidelity to reality.
This type of painting stands in the traditional
of: trompe l'oeil (a style of painting dating from
the Renaissance, which developed in response to
the discovery of perspective in 15th century Italy
and advances in optics in 17th century Holland)
and 17th century Dutch painting (Vermeer, Van
Dyke, Franz Hals, Jan Steen, Rembrandt) with its
exacting technique and highly finished surfaces.

Estes was born in 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois. He
moved to Chicago at an early age and studied fine
arts from 1952 to 1956, with a concentration on
figure drawing and traditional academic painting,
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He
frequently studied the works of realist painters
such as Degas, Hopper and Eakins, who are strongly
represented in the Art Institute's collection.
Estes moved to New York City in 1956, after he had
completed his course of studies, and worked for
the next ten years as a graphic artist for various
magazine publishers and advertising agencies in
New York and Spain. During this period he painted
in his spare time, and by 1966 he had saved enough
money so that he could devote himself full-time to
painting. 
Most of Estes' paintings from the early 60's are
of New Yorkers engaged in everyday activities. It
was around 1967 that a shift occurred in his city
scenes: he began to paint storefronts and
buildings with glass windows partially reflecting
images of the street scene in front of the
building. These paintings were based on color
photographs he would make of his object, which
trapped the evanescent nature of the reflections,
which would change in part with the lighting and
the time of day. While some amount of alteration
was done for the sake of aesthetic composition, it
was important to Estes that the central and the
main reflected objects be recognizable, but also
that the evanescent quality of the reflections be
retained. Estes had his first of many one-man
shows in 1968, at the Allan Stone Gallery in New
York.

Estes has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum. In 1971, he was granted a
National Council for the Arts Fellowship. 

http://www.art-interview.com Interview with
Richard Estes