Richard Estes – Downtown, Telephone Booths, Subway and Other Paintings

Aug 22, 2024

2 min read

Richard Estes, Downtown, 1978

Richard Estes’ hyper realistic paintings of 1960s and 70s New York City are one of my newest art discoveries and I have really enjoyed being immersed in the bygone world that Estes portrayed. In my mind, these are the streets that Robert de Niro and Jodie Foster were walking on in the film Taxi Driver (1976). This is the New York City of The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, Blondie, Sting, The Ramones and others. The New York City that Elizabeth Wurtzel describes when she writes about her childhood in her memoir “Prozac Nation”, the New York City of Woody Allen’s films. Cold, mean streets of the big city have always had an appeal to me and Estes’ portrayals of New York are a feast for the eyes. Estes purposefully decided to focus on the everyday streetscenes, not on the famous landmarks and I like that because it makes the paintings feel more real. Today, Estes is considered to be one of the founders of the photorealist movement that originated in the late 1960s, alongside artists Robert Cottingham, Chuck Close, John Baeder and others. Sometimes this style is referred to as hyper-realism or super-realism. Still, I think photo-realism is a better choice for the name because it shows the correlation between the two arts; a merging of photography and painting and their intertwining influences. It was around 1967 that Estes started using his coloured photographs as a basis for his painting. He said: “I worked in advertising, That’s where I started using photographs to make illustrations. I saw all the other people were doing it—they didn’t put a model in front of them and make a careful drawing.”When it comes to themes and the mood of the scenes depicted, I am reminded of the paintings of Edward Hopper; the same sense of isolation, coldness, and quietness permeats the city scenes of both artists. I couldn’t pick just one painting to write about because I think seen together they sort of form a visual story, they connect onto one another like a patchwork, all with the same mood, as if they were pictures taken on the same day. And which day would that be? A quiet day, with not much bustle and noise, a Sunday morning perhaps just as it was presented by Edward Hopper decades earlier. As you can see from some examples that I have chosen bellow, Estes has a particular penchant for capturing the reflective surface, whether it’s windows on skyscrapers or just polished surfaces of cars or buses. In the painting “Telephone Booths”, from 1967, this play of reflections is captured particularly mesmerisingly.