Piers in The Water

Photo-realism is a school of painting that came into prominence in the 1960s. Taking images from photographic slides, and then rendering them carefully in watercolor, this artist seems to remove herself from the process of making decisions about how she will render what she sees in the world. However, the choice to make her paintings look like photographs is also a decision. And despite how this painting looks at a glance, upon close inspection it becomes clear that this work is made by an artist's hand, not by a photo-mechanical process.