Bert Monroy

A twist on my favourite art movement, photorealism, Bert Monroy specialises in digital photorealism.


"Red Truck" 2004


"Peter's Ice Cream" 1991 (!!)


"Oakland" 2004


"Oakland" 2004 (detail)

"As a photo-realist painter, I have often been asked why I don’t just take a photograph. Good question, when you consider my paintings look like photographs. Well, for one thing, I’m not a photographer. To me, it is not the destination that is important—it is the journey.
The incredible challenge of recreating reality is my motivation." -- Bert Monroy

"Lunch In Tiburon" (date?)


"The Sidelines" 1999

Monroy started out in a career in advertising and since 1984 has been making what he calls "digital paintings". They're really quite something, and his website allows you to zoom in on some details and the thought that the image isn't actually there, it's all made up of random shapes and shadows, it's a trip.


"Damen" 2006


"Damen" 2006 (detail)

Here are some statistics for graphic design nerds like me:

"This is my latest and most ambitious digital painting of a Chicago scene unveiled at Photoshop World in Miami on March 22, 2006.
It is a panorama of the Damen Station on the Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority.
Adobe Illustrator was used for generating the majority of the basic shapes as well as all the buildings in the Chicago skyline.
The rest was created in Photoshop.
• The image size is 40 inches by 120 inches.
• The flattened file weighs in at 1.7 Gigabytes.
• It took eleven months (close to 2,000 hours) to create.
• The painting is comprised of close to fifty individual Photoshop files.
• Taking a cumulative total of all the files, the overall image contains over 15,000 layers.
• Over 500 alpha channels were used for various effects.
• Over 250,000 paths make up the multitude of shapes throughout the scene.

flickr favourites #5

originally uploaded by BrigitteChanson.

Le monument aux victimes civiles fusillées en 1914

Since I don't really take myself serious as a photographer (I like taking photos, but nothing more than that), I don't really take time to share my photos in the pools set up on Flickr, but yesterday I got a comment on one of my photos of a war memorial in Tourcoing, asking if I'd like to add it to a new Flickr pool dedicated to Monuments aux Morts -- French War Memorials, usually dedicated to those who died during the First World War.

There's some really striking images in this new pool, and I hate to make any generalisations as to why French memorials are so stunning, but please have a look through the photos. On the Wikipedia entry for War Memorials', you get an impression of all the different kinds of War Memorials different countries have erected over the years.

With 'On Passing the Menin Gate' by Siegfried Sassoon in mind, I have to say that those big plaques listing the names of those who died, make me feel terribly uncomfortable. I think that, in a way, those long, long lists of names do little to really focus on all of the lives lost -- the names are there, but that's it. I think the statues that really depict people, like the one in BrigitteChanson's photo, bring across a much stronger, universal image of grief and mourning, without being clichéd. It's important to honour the soldiers who died, of course, but memorials like the one in Tourcoing make you remember why it's important.

originally uploaded by stagedoorjohnny.

That memorial in Tourcoing is the most beautiful memorial I've ever seen, it reminded me of 'The Raft of the Medusa' by Théodore Géricault -- walking around the statue you go from seeing the wounded and dying soldiers at the base of the statue to the struggling, and as they get nearer to the top, the soldiers walk more upright and it ends with (I suppose) Victoria or Nike on her horse leading them to triumph. I suppose at the end of the day it's still a form of wartime propaganda, but still, it's quite immense.

flickr favourites #3

originally uploaded by emmgee67.

When my parents and I were in Washington D.C. in 2006, visiting my brother, we were lucky enough to catch the Robert Bechtle retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It was one of the most impressive art exhibitions I've ever seen, and Bechtle's photorealist paintings have stuck with me ever since.

Bechtle is a pretty big name when it comes to photorealism, and apparently his car "portraits" are well-known enough to spawn a (small) Flickr pool in homage. Aside from the car portraits, Bechtle used a lot of photographs of his family as inspiration for his paintings; walking around the exhibit it was a strange way of walking into someone's life - you started with him meeting his wife, went through their children's early childhood, and then it was like you were witness to the breakdown of their marriage and the subsequent remarriages.

"You can take photographs of something but you never possess it because it's too fast.. there's something very intense about the experience of sitting down and having to look at it in the way that you do in order to make a drawing of it, or to make a painting of it.. but by the time you've done that you feel that you've really understood what you were looking at and also that you've felt a little of yourself there, and somehow it becomes a way of.. possessing the experience in a way that another manner doesn't quite seem to do."

Quite heart-breaking to think that Bechtle painted his divorce, isn't it? Art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New Yorker magazine, "Life is incredibly complicated, and the proof is that when you confront any simple, stopped part of it you are stupefied."

John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais, A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge (1852)

From Wikipedia:

It depicts a pair of young lovers in an embrace. The familiar subject is given a dramatic twist because the "embrace" is in fact an attempt by the girl to get her beloved to wear a white armband, declaring his allegiance to Roman Catholicism. The young man gently pulls the armband off with the same hand with which he embraces the girl. The incident refers to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 when French Protestants (Huguenots) were massacred in Paris, leading to other massacres elsewhere in France. A small number of Protestants escaped from the city by wearing white armbands.

I saw this painting at the Van Gogh Museum this afternoon - while at first look it appears to be just another painting of two young lovers, those three fingers hooked in that armband are so subtle that it turns the painting into one of the most heart-wrenching I've ever seen.

The detail in John Everett Millais' paintings is extraordinary - at times the leaves in his paintings look so realistic, it's like someone got a bit overzealous with the 'sharpen details'-tool in Adobe Photoshop. Most of the reproductions you find on the internet or in books are absolutely horrendous, though, they don't do Millais justice - that purple jacket is so vibrant; the colours he used caught your eye from across the room, they're impossible to reproduce.