Tunnel (Primary Title)
Urban Landscapes (Portfolio Title)
Richard Estes, American, born 1932 (Artist)
The work of the late 20th-century Photorealist artists Robert Bechtle, Robert Cottingham, Richard Estes, and Ralph Goings attests to the lingering influence of Precisionism. The unblended colors and tonal gradations lend a realism to Estes’s art that is also found in work by Sheeler, Elsie Driggs, and Louis Lozowick. Like Cottingham, Estes worked in advertising before becoming an artist. The starkness of works like Tunnel evokes Sheeler, but a more direct Precisionist reference are the drastically foreshortened bridges of earlier 20th-century artist Ralston Crawford. Estes found in the medium of silkscreen (also called screenprint) an amalgam of effects sought out by the Precisionists as well: “With silkscreen you have to sacrifice the soft edges and blending colors. It has to be sharp-edged . . . you aren’t going to get that warm lush quality that other print processes have. . . . There is none of that thin, transparent quality of other print methods in silkscreen.”
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