npr:

American painter Richard Estes has made a career out of fooling the eye. His canvases look like photographs — but they’re not.

“You can’t see my paintings in reproduction,” the 82-year-old artist says. That’s because, in reproduction, the paintings — especially his New York cityscapes from the late 1960s — look like photos. He’s called a photo-realist, or hyper-realist — an intense observer of the built environment. But he doesn’t paint the view from his apartment window.

“His window is a photograph,” says Jessica May, co-curator of Estes’ current show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Estes uses photography as a starting point for painting. He goes out and takes dozens of photographs of the same thing from different angles — street corners, diners, reflections on plate glass windows — then he cuts, pastes and manipulates »