What does it take to let a viewer into a work of art — and who decides how wide the door opens?
A friend of mine — a fantasy illustrator with a formidable classical training and strong opinions, which is the best kind of friend to have — and I have been arguing about realism in art. It started with a conversation about photo reference.
Many contemporary fantasy and science fiction illustrators work by dressing models in costumes, photographing them, and then copying those photographs ranging from meticulous fidelity to less faithful copying— adding some horns here, some wings there, Frankenstein-ing elements from different sources. Technically accomplished. Often breathtaking. Occasionally wonky and disconnected. My friend admires some of this work; I find myself unmoved by most of it, and I've been trying to figure out exactly why.
It isn't about skill. Skill I can appreciate even when a work leaves me cold. What bothers me is something subtler: the photograph, in this workflow, has become the vision. The painting becomes a transcription. When an artist paints from life — from an actual model, in actual light, in real time — every mark is a decision, a continuous translation of three-dimensional reality into a two-dimensional surface. That act of translation is the art. The lost edges, the identification of a focal point, the mastery of selection — the mediation between seeing and making is where the imagination lives. When that mediation is collapsed by a camera, something essential goes missing, and no amount of technical virtuosity can fully replace it.
My friend sort of agreed, as she reliably does. And in doing so, she prompted a much larger question in my mind: what makes realism meaningful in the first place? And how much of it does a viewer actually need?
Realism isn’t the destination. For many viewers it’s the ticket— the thing that gets you through the door.
My friend was trained in an atelier in the tradition of classical Russian painting. Her heroes are some of the Slavic greats: Mucha, Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov, Vrubel, Vasnetsov— painters for whom the luminous rendering of form is not just technique but philosophy. For her, the capacity to render is proof of genuine engagement with the visible world. An artist who can't render hasn't earned the right to abstraction; an artist who won't is withholding something. She admires Kandinsky because his early works proved he can render. But when she stands before a Rothko, she doesn't feel moved — she feels rebuffed. The work offers her no entry point, and so she experiences it as emptiness rather than openness.
I understand this. I worked as an illustrator for 15 years before graduate school did what my mother feared and ruined me. In the world of commercial illustration — in children's science publishing, in the fantasy and science fiction genres — the highest praise you can earn is it looks so real. The most sought-after artists are the ones who can render light convincingly, who can make a dragon's scales feel tactile, who can put you on that ship in that storm. Narrative legibility is the professional virtue. Realism is the proof of mastery. Even illustrators with expressive, open painting styles — Frazetta, John Harris, Leyendecker — are still masters of a kind of realism she can get behind. These are some of my favorites too.
But what Dalí understood — and what my friend herself acknowledges when she talks about why Dalí and Escher work for her — is that realism isn't the destination. For many viewers, it's the ticket. The thing that gets you through the door.
Dalí's melting watches have perfect cast shadows. The light in his paintings is Catalonian afternoon light, specific and unimpeachable. The impossible content — the distorted flesh, the elephants on spider legs, the dream logic — sits inside a pictorial reality so trustworthy that you follow it willingly into the impossible. The realism is the handshake that says: I speak your visual language. Come in. Once you're inside, the strangeness becomes navigable. Escher operates the same way — his paradoxes are drawn with such draftsmanlike precision that you don't experience them as failures of representation. You experience them as revelations.
My friend also admires Picasso, because she knows his early academic paintings — the portraits and figure studies that prove beyond any doubt that he could have painted like Bouguereau if he'd wanted to. That knowledge changes how she reads the Cubist work. It wasn't incompetence. It was a deliberate setting-aside, a choice to break the rules after having learned them. He walked away from one kind of mastery to pursue a harder one: a way of representing not how a thing looks from a fixed point, but how it is known — circled, inhabited, held in the mind simultaneously from every angle. He ignored the collectors who threatened to abandon him. He did it anyway.
Matisse spent decades learning to paint like the Renaissance masters, then spent the rest of his life learning to paint like a child — on purpose. That’s not laziness. That is a second, harder curriculum. Restraint, when it is earned, is its own kind of virtuosity.
Carl Jung's Red Book offers yet another variation on this renunciation — and a stranger one. Jung didn't eschew realism because he'd mastered and transcended it the way Picasso had. He reached past it entirely, back to the pre-perspectival visual grammar of medieval illumination and alchemical diagrams, the mandala geometries that predate the whole Western project of pictorial illusionism. His symbolic imagery works not because it's rendered convincingly, but because it operates at the level of the collective unconscious — a vocabulary so deep it feels inherited rather than learned. He isn't showing you somewhere new and asking you to meet him there. He's showing you somewhere you've always been and asking you to remember. The handshake isn't I speak your visual language. It's something older: you already know this. You just forgot.
Realism says: I'll take you there. Abstraction says: meet me here. Magic Realism says: look—you've always been here.
This is also, I think, what the painters I love most deeply are doing. Frida Kahlo's imagery is strange and sometimes brutal, but it arrives before interpretation does — grounded in Catholic iconography, pre-Columbian mythology, the body rendered as literal landscape. You don't need an art history degree to feel what's happening in The Two Fridas. The meaning comes up through the floor. It bypasses the rational mind entirely and lands somewhere older and more gut-level.
This is the tradition I find myself gravitating back toward in my own work — Magic Realism, surrealism, the design-forward and symbolically dense. Not illustration's locked-down legibility, and not pure abstraction's open field. Something in between: work that feels like it should be recognized, like it comes from a symbolic vocabulary just at the edge of memory. Almost-familiar. Almost-remembered.
Which brings me back to the question my friend and I started with, and what I think is actually at the heart of it: the relationship a work of art proposes between the artist and the viewer. Realism says I'll take you there — it assumes full responsibility for the journey. Pure abstraction says meet me here — it assumes a viewer prepared to bring their own experience and complete the meaning themselves. Magic Realism, surrealism, the archetypal and symbolic — these say something different again: you've always been here. Look. They reach down into a shared depth and ask the viewer to recognize what they find there.
None of these proposals is superior. They are different invitations, requiring different readiness to accept. My friend needs — and I say this with genuine affection — at least one representational handshake before she'll follow you into the strange. Honor the physics of light. Give her a body she can believe in. Offer some evidence of the discipline she was trained to recognize. Do that, and she'll go considerable distances with you. Decline entirely, and the door feels locked rather than open.
That's not a failure of her sensibility. It's a different literacy, shaped by a different formation. What the atelier gives you — and it gives you remarkable things — it doesn't always give you a framework for work that refuses every conventional entry point and still repays sustained attention. That framework usually has to be built separately, out of philosophy and time and a willingness to sit with uncertainty long enough that it stops feeling like abandonment.
Illustration — the world I came from — tends strongly toward realism's proposal. Locked-down meaning is what a company needs to sell a product, what a children's book needs to convey a concept. There is nothing wrong with serving that function.
I've spent most of my professional life doing it and I still find the work meaningful. But I've learned to make other things too — objects that don't tell you what to feel, that hand you something and trust you to bring it alive. Things that feel like artifacts from a symbolic world you almost remember.
My mother was worried that graduate school would ruin my abilities. She was not wrong. It ruined them in the best possible way.
The collectors who loved my older, tightly-rendered work have told me they won't follow me into what I'm making now. I have made my peace with that. Not every viewer needs to come through every door. But I've learned to leave them open.
“The progression of a painter’s work…will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer…to achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.”
How to critique art objectively? An earlier post…