Embroidered Collage

Oh, there's a guy painting the wall inside the museum.  I wonder why he's doing that during business hours.  And, wait, why is it going to be pink?  He's not moving.  Blink.  That's right!

These were the thoughts running through my head because I had forgotten that the featured special exhibit at the Michener Museum in Doylestown was the hyper-realistic statues of Duane Hanson.  For a few moments, as I walked closer to this piece set amid the regular exhibits, I was captured by the illusion. 

I had seen the statues in magazines before, but it hurt my brain to see them in person, because I kept expecting them to move.  Hanson develops the primary forms by creating molds from models then dresses and paints and draws to create the details in the skin and features that fool the eye.  The coloring has just the right amount of unevenness to it.  One statue was of a lady sleeping in her bikini and you could see that she had been out in the sun too long because she was pinking up with a bit of a burn.

This exhibit really drove home to me how an exacting realism can capture the viewer.  A number of artists in mixed media combine realism with abstraction by using photos, but I wonder who out there does so in just one medium, painting or drawing, for example.  How does the contrast work visually?