The first in a series of hand-painted photo-composites. Unlike the earlier strictly photo-realist paintings in which the subject of the photograph is more or less inconsequential, here the distinctly un-modern qualities of symbolism, narrative and allegory are apparent. The images are taken from both advertising and coffee table fine art manuals, the most famous of which is Vermeer’s ‘The Allegory of Painting,’ a work which stresses the primacy of history painting (see Owl). Vermeer was a photo-realist painter 300 years before Richard Estes, depicting banal scenes of contemporaneous life using a camera obscura. Also featured are works from the Neo-Dadaist Jasper Johns. “People have forgotten that the founder of Dadaism, Tristan Tzara, stated in his manifesto in the very infancy of the movement: ‘Dada is this. Dada is that... Either way it’s crap.’ This kind of more or less black humour is foreign to the new generation. They are genuinely convinced that their neo-Dadaism is subtler than the art of Praxiteles.” - Salvador Dali.