A photograph captures light in a fraction of a second. A hyperrealist painting takes weeks or months to fake that same fraction of a second, brushstroke by brushstroke, until the surface reads as a lens rather than a hand. The ten painters below work in oil, acrylic and watercolor, and each has picked a different way to test that illusion, from candy under glass to a cow's face lit by a sunset.
1. Wrapped, by Robin Eley
Robin Eley paints copies of old master paintings, then paints them a second time as if sealed under a taped, torn sheet of semi-transparent plastic. The effect is two layers of illusion stacked on top of each other: the reproduced painting has to read as convincing on its own, and the plastic sheeting over it has to read as physically real, creases, tape and torn edges included. The series reworks Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "The Milkmaid," along with Van Gogh's "The Starry Night." Eley was born in London in 1978, raised in Australia from age 1981, and holds a BA in Fine Art from Westmont College in California. He is now based in Los Angeles.
2. Water portraits, by Linnea Strid
Linnea Strid paints close-up portraits built almost entirely around water on skin: shower spray, streaming hair, individual droplets caught mid-fall on a cheek or a nose. Pieces like "We Are All Stardust" and "Ritual" crop the frame tight around the shoulders and face, so the water itself, not the body, carries the image. Strid was born in a small village in Sweden in 1983, moved to Spain at 16, and now works from Stockholm. Her paintings have shown across Europe, the US, Asia and Australia, including in the opening exhibition of Berlin's URBAN NATION Museum in 2017.
3. Still life paintings, by Pedro Campos
Pedro Campos trained in art restoration before turning to oil painting professionally at 30, and he credits that restoration background for his color accuracy. His still lifes take ordinary objects, glass, cans, fruit, and light them hard enough that reflections and highlights become the real subject: a rack of billiard balls under a single overhead light, three Coca-Cola cans wrapped in crumpled cellophane, cherries lined up inside a glass case. Campos is based in Madrid and represented by Plus One Gallery in London.
4. Still life paintings, by Jason de Graaf
Jason de Graaf works in acrylic on panel from his studio in Vankleek Hill, Ontario, using everyday objects as the entire subject of each piece. "Inveniam Viam" sets a lit candle beside a glass dome and a stack of old books; "Mustard" traps a few sprigs of flowering mustard in a small glass jar; "Goblet III" piles dark grapes over the rim of a wine glass against a stormy sky. His own stated approach is to use ordinary objects as psychological stand-ins inside scenes that look photographic but are composed by instinct rather than copied directly from a photo.
5. Submerged portraits, by Kei Mieno
Kei Mieno paints oil portraits, often of young women lying in shallow, rocky streams, fully clothed and soaked through. The water breaks and refracts around the fabric and skin in a way that's easy to mistake for a still frame from video. His other portrait work stays quieter: a young woman in a gray sweater against a flat backdrop, a single stone rendered in near-total darkness. Mieno works from Japan; the site footer credits the paintings to "KEI MIENO."
6. Candy still life paintings, by Roberto Bernardi
Roberto Bernardi studied art restoration in his native Todi, Italy, before turning to painting, and began working candy and Pop Art imagery into his hyperrealism after a series of trips to Manhattan starting in 2004. Pieces like "La girandola rossa" and "Il Vuoto" pack lollipops and wrapped sweets into glass jars and containers, using the cellophane wrappers and glass to multiply the reflections across the canvas. He sometimes collaborates with painter Raphaella Spence on larger pieces.
7. Breakfast for Two and Marbles on Marble, by Steve Mills
Steve Mills spends up to 700 hours on a single oil painting, working to push past what a camera can actually capture rather than copy a photo directly. "Breakfast for Two" lines up a glass mixing bowl, a whisk, broken and whole eggs and a coffee tin on a reflective counter; "Marbles on Marble" oversizes five glass marbles across a polished stone surface, each one throwing its own set of internal reflections. Mills was born in Boston in 1959, studied at Bridgewater State College, and now works from Jacksonville, Florida.
8. Watercolor still life paintings, by Eric Christensen
Most hyperrealist still life painters work in oil, which is forgiving of corrections. Eric Christensen works in watercolor, a medium that punishes mistakes since there's no painting over them. His still lifes favor wine, glassware and bar setups, cocktail glasses lined up with limes and lemons, bottles catching light against a dark backdrop, rendered with the same sharp reflections and highlights other painters reach for in oil. Christensen is based in the Salt Lake City, Utah area.
9. Cattle portraits, by Teresa Elliott
Teresa Elliott worked as a graphic designer and illustrator in Dallas before a sold-out 2006 gallery show in Fort Worth turned her toward fine art full time. She paints oil portraits of cattle, close-cropped and lit like human portraiture, drawing on her own family's ranching history near Alpine, Texas. "Twister" sets a longhorn against a funnel cloud forming in the distance; "Bandido" and "High Plains Calf" bring the camera in tight on a single animal's face. Elliott holds a BFA from the University of Kansas.
10. Rain-streaked windshield paintings, by Gregory Thielker
Gregory Thielker paints landscapes as seen through a rain-covered car windshield, working from his own road-trip photography and rendering every droplet, streak and blur in oil on linen. "Down Below" and "Tempest" both put the viewer in the driver's seat at dusk, road and treeline dissolving behind glass that's doing exactly what real rain-streaked glass does to light. Thielker is an American artist based in Paris, a Fulbright Fellow, and has held residencies in India, Norway, El Salvador and Argentina.
