Irony.

I was reading a thread over at conceptart.org forums entitled" If everyone is so good, why is nothing photo realistic?"The ignorance of the thread starter was so thick that I couldn't even reply with anything because their was no chance he would understand it. Personally, I despise adding the word " photo" next to realism. What would a piece rendered to the extent that it had the illusionistic qualities necessary to fully resemble reality be called, other than realism? Before the invention of the camera? Why must "photo" stand beside the word just because of the invention of cameras? Any attempts at " Photo" realism are most commonly just pieces copied from... a photograph believe it or not. When the intention of the piece is to replicate that exact photo, there is no possible result that can be considered a better piece of art than that original photo. I also find it interesting that most photos that are considered " good" in the first place usually have qualities sought after in a painting- such as an array of soft and hard edges, excellent composition; both in placement of the subject and arrangement of shadow shapes, exceptional use of value ( and color if applicable) etc. There's more I could say about all this but it's hard to get all of my thoughts nice and collected when reno 911 and pokemon is on my mind.

to justify the title of this post, I am showing an update of the self portrait in progress. I am going to let this first layer dry and complete it at a later date. The irony is that lately I haven't been satisfied with my paintings because I feel that being loose is an easy way to hide drawing errors, and worse, the fact that I don't have the skill to more completely render them. My intentions with this self portrait is to bring it to a higher degree of finish, of higher rendering, to create a sense of realism( photo- realism, if you will, for the joke's sake).

I already know of some proportional issues that will be dealt with in the future.

and heres 2 others for good measure. both 8x10