All are drawn or painted in a commanding style that bridges exacting realism and poetic vision.
The project thus went underground, and the development from the close-grained, mercilessly exact emotional realism of the two early novels to the looser, more playful voice of the late work was able to continue in private, immunised from the effects of further hostility.
There's no getting away from the uncanny valley phenomenon here, but presumably in an effort to make that effect comic rather than sinister, the avatars have a cartoonish air, rather than going after exact photo-realism.
Creativity is not the ability to draw the vase of flowers on your dining room table with exacting photo-realism.
Mr. Auster's novel hovers gracefully between "once upon a time" and the exact dates of realism, taking in a fair amount of the century's history -- Walt rises with Lindbergh and crashes with the stock market.
Meanwhile, an exacting yet gentle realism dominates in his views of Paris rooftops, a fairy-tale German town and a sharply foreshortened pile of lumber.
She leavens her exacting, sometimes grotesque realism, which evokes Neue Sachlichkeit, with regular doses of neo-Expressionist extravagances ?a Martin Kippenberger and occasional bits of art-historical quotation (from van Gogh, for example).
The three examples here quietly satirize Photo Realism's celebration of exacting technique by demonstrating that it was available for hire.
But I do think that 8-bit realism, by being pretty much the exact opposite of the uncanny valley, inspires the imagination.
