Hyperrealism in Contemporary Art (Jamil)

Deviating a bit from graphic design, I wanted to touch on another form of inspiration for me. So, I’m a visual artist first and foremost. I made a transition to design later. I work mostly with graphite and some oil. My artistic style has its roots in early photorealism, an art movement from the early 1960s where artists would take photo references of everyday scenes/objects and recreate realistic drawings and paintings of them, putting a painstaking emphasis on attention to detail. I come from a much more contemporary version of this called “Hyperrealism.” The first two photos pictured above are some of my own artwork. I drew both of them in graphite a couple of years ago, and both are examples of hyperrealistic representational work. One is a portrait that I worked on not long after the untimely death of Chadwick Boseman. The other is a drawing I did of some lips. I love these drawings because they marked an exponential jump in skill level for me, and this opened new doors.

The third one is a painting by one of my favorite photorealist artists, Chuck Close. This was an acrylic on canvas self-portrait he did back in 1968. It was a revolutionary approach to visual art at the time because it challenged traditional notions of what portraits were supposed to be and what they were supposed to look like. It demonstrated meticulous technique and incredible precision. It was artists like Chuck Close that inspired me to do more work that required high levels of technical skill, pushing the boundaries of the status quo’s ideas of what art is and how we should express that.