Rackstraw Downes is an artist from England who does realistic landscape paintings. He does not consider himself a landscape artist but one who just notices his surroundings. He pays attention to extreme details which creates a highly realistic look to his paintings. While living in England, Rackstraw Downes became familiar with surroundings that had been touched by people so when he moved to the United States in 1980, the massive amounts of untouched land was completely foreign to him. He enjoys including industrial elements in his work because we often want to look past those details. They are essentially what gives us power and our everyday modern amenities and he tries to bring appreciation to these details in his work. He paints plein air, tries not to use any photography, and paints how the natural eye would perceive it. He mainly works with oil paints and canvas. Rackstraw Downes has been extremely successful in his education and his career. He has a masters degree from Yale University and has his work in several prestigious art museums permanent collections. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and has works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Houston and the National Gallery of Art and plenty others.
I picked Rackstraw Downes for my artist presentation mainly because I appreciate the attention he gives to the smallest of details in his paintings. His paintings almost look like photographs and in my opinion that is very difficult for someone to achieve. I like that his paintings aren’t typical landscapes and includes the industrial elements we often look over. Sometimes these industrial elements can ruin certain aspects of art but Rackstraw Downes shows how these can be incorporated into it.
