Downtown

Like other painters associated with photo-realistic painting, Estes works from photographs, yet his urban landscapes do much more than merely offer a seemingly precise record of reality. The composition of "Downtown" is vertically divided in two. While on the right hand side of the painting we see a strongly foreshortened storefront, the left half shows a deserted street which, flanked by two parked cars, runs back towards the facade of some building. In the right half of the painting, the stairs of a New York subway entrance can be made out, explaining the picture’s title. The seemingly over-precise perspective and the almost hallucinatory clarity of Estes’ painting are brought about in fact by various spatial manipulations. This hyper-visibility, where what is distant and what is near is brought into equally sharp focus – a feat the naked eye is incapable of – is achieved through the fusion of countless snapshots of one and the same setting. Estes draws from a wealth of such pictures with different focal points, light reflexes and angles, using them like sketches from which the final painting is put together. In contrast to many other photo-realists, Estes transfers the photographic originals onto the support medium without resorting to mechanical means. Since he does not use a spray-gun, the individual brushstrokes can still be made out in the finished work.