Word: airbrush
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...characteristics of the style are extreme, deadpan literalness of image, generally repainted from photos with an airbrush, immaculate precision of surface, and a taste for mechanical subjects such as cars, fire trucks and long expanses of shiny kitchenware. The average result is an almost unimaginably stupid and passive materialism-the boredom of Warhol's silk-screened photos without their threat and bite. Thus, confronted for the nth time with another perfect rendering of reflections on the chrome gizzard of a Harley-Davidson or the pastille skin of a Volkswagen, one is apt to recall Truman Capote's sneer...
...minority of airbrush realists do explore one important problem of naturalism: how much information can a painted surface carry, and when does it start usurping the denseness of reality itself? California Artist Richard McLean's Rustler Charger (done from a black-and-white photo in a horse magazine) contains an unassimilable welter of detail, from the pebbles on the ground to the stitching on the girl's pants to the last speckle on the horse's coat. But, says McLean, 37, "it's not just a blown-up photo. I try to get a more heightened...
...then bother to rehash such a past, one that even the most skilled of touch-up artists couldn't airbrush into the semblance of virtue...