You Can Almost Taste The Honey From These Hyperreal Paintings By Mike Dargas [Gallery]

Since the 1950s, contemporary art has been the blanket term to classify popular styles of art created during specific decades. At the turn of the new millennium, popular contemporary art styles being utilized included street art, video game art, virtual art, urban art, and even a Kitsch Movement. With the aforementioned styles above, the last decade (2001 to 2010) had an estimated total of sixteen different art styles. Unfortunately, it is also the fewest styles a decade had, compared to previous decades.

Despite the decline in new art styles, there are still artists who push beyond the creative threshold set by those who came before them. One such artist is Mike Dargas, known for utilizing an art style showing prominence this decade (2011 to 2020), hyperrealism. To understand what this art style is, all an individual has to do is imagine if a high-definition picture were painted. That’s hyperrealism.

According to Huffington Post, Mike Dargas, the Cologne-based painter, found inspiration through Blake Little’s photo series of honey-covered people for his latest series of hyperreal paintings. Initiating it back in 2014, Dargas experimented with a variety of different liquids to add the anomalous texture of honey to women’s faces, something he chose because its consistency caught his eye.

“It’s [honey’s] transparency and reflections are perfect for my realistic works.”

It was also reported the process of painting hyperrealism is quite painstaking. Generally, hyperrealism is artistically pursued on a minute scale using mediums known for precision. Therefore, most original hyperrealistic works of art are smaller in size and made using professional colored pencils. Though, there are exceptions, to generally pull off hyperrealism for paintings, artists must use a lot of paint on a large canvas. That is why almost all hyperrealistic paintings are large in size, including works by Mike Dargas.

Despite this hindrance, it is one hyperrealism artists are willing to suffer to create an authentic work of art that looks, as stated earlier, looks like a high-definition photograph. More of Mike Dargas’ painting can be viewed at Artnau through Ignant. Select paintings have been attached in the gallery below including a WIP (work in progress).

[Images via Mike Dargas/Artnau]