Work
Estes stayed true to the photographs: when his paintings included stickers, signs, and window displays, they were always depicted backwards, because of the reflection. His works rarely included litter or snow around the buildings, because he believed these details would detract attention away from the buildings themselves. The settings were always in the daytime, never the nighttime, suggesting "vacant and quiet Sunday mornings." Estes' works strive to create a three-dimensional feel on a two-dimensional canvas. His work has been considered using a variety of terms, ranging from super-realism, sharp-focus realism, neo-realism, photo-realism, to radical realism. The most frequented term is super-realism. Most of Richard's paintings from the early 1960s are of city dwellers engaged in everyday activities. Beginning around 1967, he began to paint storefronts and buildings with glass windows and, more importantly, the reflected images shown on these windows. The paintings were based on color photographs he would take, which trapped the evanescent nature of the reflections, which would change with the lighting and the time of day. Estes' paintings were based on several photographs of the subject. He avoided using famous New York landmarks. His paintings provided fine detail that were invisible to the naked eye, and gave "depth and intensity of vision that only artistic transformation can achieve." 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. He had his one-man show in 1968, at the Allan Stone Gallery. His works have also been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1971, Estes was granted a National Council for the Arts fellowship.
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