Fool's Gold

Would you have guessed this is an oil painting??  Carly Waito's hyper-realistic paintings of metals and gems had me at hello.

Interesting that when so much contemporary art is focused on getting away from illusionistic, representative traditional approaches to painting and shocking the viewer with the new and the "is it art?", that something purely representational can appear so incredibly fresh.

Really, at it's most basic, this painting (with a very clever spin) has many highly traditional attributes: it is an effort at depicting something realistically, and it depicts something beautiful and even worshipped, much as art from the 15th-19th centuries illustrated religious scenes, beautiful landscapes, and wealthy patrons.

via Pixels & Arrows