Actually, Iconic: Richard Estes

FEMALE NARRATOR: Next on Actually Iconic .

These images could easily be mistaken for photographs, but they are actually paintings, meticulously detailed works of art.

The genre is called Photorealism.

>> People were really taken with this work.

I mean it - it was huge!

FEMALE NARRATOR: Richard Estes is a legendary figure in the Photorealism movement.

And he's focused mostly on his corner of the universe, New York City, elevating ordinary streetscape to high art.

RICHARD ESTES: I'm sort of obsessed with public transportation, you know, subways, the Staten Island Ferry.

>> He convincingly conveys the interior of the subway at the same time, this beautiful exterior of New York.

WOMAN: New York doesn't look like it did when Richard painted those pictures.

That part of New York is is gone now, FEMALE NARRATOR: Richard Estes has spent decades perfecting his craft.

MAN: The Photorealists - they don't drink, they don't smoke, they don't get divorced, they don't get into scandals.

They're a completely different breed of artist.

WOMAN: Every afternoon he's in the studio painting.

He works, and he works very hard.

RICHARD ESTES: If I had an unsuccessful day, you have to do it over again.

No, it doesn't get any easier, and it doesn't get any faster.

FEMALE NARRATOR: Meet Richard Estes, and experience New York City as never before.

Next on Actually Iconic.

[jazz music playing] RICHARD ESTES: I always have the feeling that one should paint just what's in your world.

Now, look at the world try to understand it just to look at.

I think that's still what I'm doing.

I am a camera I guess.

I've taken the most boring subjects in a way that I could, and sometimes they're the most interesting.

[interposing voices] RICHARD ESTES: Well, you don't really look for anything in particular because everything is an accident.

You just keep your eye open for something interesting, and then you snap it before it disappears.

For every one painting, I've taken 150 photos.

Even with film, I would go out a day shooting, it would be maybe a dozen 24-exposure rolls of 120 film.

So it's a lot of pictures.

So not many of them really ended up as paintings.

Actually, I think the first film I ever developed I was eight years old.

My grandmother gave me a developing kit where you had to-- trays of chemicals and you just dipped the film in there, worked it back on forth and then I-- in the different chemicals and let it dry and then laid the negatives-- because they were big negatives-- on photo paper and exposure it and develop that.

[music playing] JOHN WILMERDING: Richard has emerged as by far the dominant figure, the best practitioner of photo realism.

RICHARD ESTES: Gradually, I just got to using photos.

It was-- it saved me the trouble of dealing with other people.

If I models or anything, I could-- you didn't have to get someone to be there and, it simplified things.

I would just pick out different figures and different photos I had taken, and sort of put them in different places, trying to do sort of an expressionistic style.

It wasn't photographic.

And most of the paintings ended up a disaster.

I still have a few left where you can see that I painted out some figures, and changed others, and not finished some.

This is one painting I probably did in the early '60s.

I use photographs in my memory and would just sort of make marks and have them suggest things.

It's completely different than what I do now.

No, I experimented with everything.

I didn't know what I really wanted to do, or what I could succeed with.

I worked in advertising, and so it was limited, the amount of time.

Usually just maybe on Saturdays and Sundays on the weekends, I would try to do some painting, and that's about all I can do.

The magazine I worked for the most is called Popular Science.

I used to do these little diagrams of "how"-- atomic power plants or how to tie knots.

I really wanted to be a painter, but I really didn't want to do abstract paintings.

And to me it seemed like every painting has an abstract quality, but it's sort of incomplete.

It's like writing music without a melody.

These rails, it's basically just a different version of a mahl stick.

You've seen where the artists, they have this stick and then you rest your hand on it so you'd have a steady touch.

And also, where it says it's very architectural, you can have all the lines really like with a cheese square.

It is parallel, you're not just guessing.

JOHN WILMERDING: It's obvious he uses photographs.

But when one sees him at work, when one looks closely at the surface of his paintings, to me, they are paintings.

They are not equivalents of photographs.

And even the pictures that look most photographic often have wonderfully soft, delicate, even abstracted things that are not totally tight, perspectival.

The photographs are literally sketches, they're studies, they're pieces of something larger that, when he's working on it, becomes something else.

And it's that transformative process that makes him a serious, significant, interesting artist.

RICHARD ESTES: This is a beautiful camera.

It's called a Linhof.

It's 4 by 5.

And for a lot of the earlier paintings, this is the camera that I was using.

Then once you're all set, it's on an easel, it's sitting there, then you have to crank it.

And then you set the shutter speed and take the picture.

You think about the pictures, really, when you're doing it, because you wait for just the right moment to click the shutter.

If it's outdoors like in a street scene situation, because you don't want to click it and then have somebody walking in front of the camera when it clicks.

So you got to make sure that everything is just right.

I don't even like to show people my photos.

They're sort of like my secret sketch book.

And I've got thousands and thousands of photos lying around in my house.

I've tried especially with a digital camera now, you press the shutter and it takes 10 pictures.

So you get all these slight variations and then you sort of piece it together.

I sort of learned a lot of this when I was working as a commercial illustrator.

It was always considered sort of a sin and dishonest to use photos for your work.

You know, there's a pretty famous painting by Manet of The Railway Station, Gare Saint-Lazare, in Paris, with two girls sort of sitting.

You can go there even now and see the same sight and even the place where they were sitting in the station, so it was obviously done from a photograph.

They always denied, I think, or never mentioned, that Eakins, and de Gaulle, and Manet, they all used photos as soon as photography came, which is about 1840-1850.

I always like to just walk down streets in cities and just not necessarily concentrate on the grand monuments, but just the general street scene and everyday architecture.

It's what makes it really interesting.

It's essentially the chaos of Times Square.

Sometimes I have more trouble with the simple blue sky than I have with some complicated, tiny lettered facade.

Sometimes I put things-- like there's this one painting I did a long time ago.

It's called The Cafeteria, and there are these red curtains on these sides.

That was completely made up, because I needed some color on the side.

LOU MEISEL: Somebody was talking to me and they said to me, how come anytime you mention photorealism, Richard Estes is the first name that comes up?

Well, that's just a reflection on how good he is.

And it's also that there was no self-promotion, there was no dealer promotion, really.

You just had to love his paintings when you saw it, whether the critics told you to or not, whether anybody told you it was good or not.

If you walked into a house or someplace, or a museum, and you saw it, you marveled at it.

RICHARD ESTES: I assumed that I would just do the painting to satisfy myself and earn a living as a commercial artist.

But I was lucky enough that I started selling the paintings.

I was able to give up the commercial art.

A paying this size I could probably do it a couple of weeks, actually.

Three or four days just getting this far, then the rest of the time it was just sharpening up everything and making it-- the first coat, the first layer of paint, it just sort of sinks in and sort of is dead.

But it also soaks in and it makes it possible then for the next coat not to soak in, because it's already soaked in.

SPEAKER 1: So how many coats of paint do you use?

RICHARD ESTES: Well, maybe three.

It depends-- some parts I may not even touch.

But especially like here, these lines, I mean, here it's all sort of dirty and it needs to be cleaned up.

SPEAKER 1: Do you always know when you're finished with a painting?

RICHARD ESTES: I just give up on a painting.

I don't finish it.

I think this is one of the first places I decided to try to paint.

In the '60s, they had the so-called "Blue Laws."

Nothing could be open on Sunday.

So you could come to Times Square on a Sunday morning, and it would be absolutely deserted.

In fact, all of New York was deserted.

And that was the time I liked to go out and photograph, and probably why in the earlier pictures there aren't that many figures, because there simply were not that many figures on the street then.

There was another theatre up here that I painted.

I think it was called Hot Girls or something.

That was bought by the Shah of Iran.

It's probably in the basement of some museum in Tehran, if they haven't destroyed it.

So I used to come here to draw, because you could count on the people just sort of sitting still for 40 minutes, whereas if you were doing it in a restaurant and people were constantly getting up and moving.

But here on the Staten Island Ferry, they would sort of come and more or less stay where they were for the journey, which was about half an hour.

So I'd have the time to do a little sketch.

This must have been after 9/11, because there's no World Trade Center.

The only thing I remember about this painting is that to get all those colors blended was the biggest challenge.

The water is easy.

I mean, you just scribble it in and it always looks right.

Yeah, I did a lot of paintings of the Staten Island Ferry.

I sort of obsess with public transportation-- you know, subways, the Staten Island Ferry.

I was using slides at first.

They didn't have good color prints until the '70s.

These you just lay on the negatives.

You lay it on a sheet of photo paper and expose it and develop it.

Then you have all these pictures, and you cut it out and put them together.

But here you can see there was one photo taking using out the window, and then the inside.

So you don't see this if you're seeing this, really-- or exactly that perspective.

I think from the very beginning they always thought I was a little bit strange.

I remember putting on my mother's high heels when I was 4.

I don't think my family would ever really recognize anything.

It probably was in the back of their minds, but they never said anything.

When I was a sophomore in high school, we moved to Evanston, a suburb of Chicago.

The high school there had a really great art department.

I was always the artist and the one that was asked to decorate if they had a prom or some sort of play or performance.

I was really a loner, actually.

I didn't have any friends to speak of in high school, which is why I think I got interested in art and music in the first place.

I liked to go to the library, and they had a beautiful library in Evanston where you could take out records, for example.

Because growing up in Sheffield, Illinois, I'd never heard anything like Wagner or Beethoven, and if we had stayed there, I never would have.

I might be operating a garage, like my father did.

When I got out of high school, I decided I wanted to go to Europe.

But I didn't have the money, so actually I worked for one year as a file clerk, putting things away.

It was miserable.

But I did manage to save enough money to take this trip to Europe.

That's where I went to a lot of the great museums.

I had planned on staying well into the fall, but I got rather homesick, decided to go back home.

After I returned from Europe, I went to the Chicago Art Institute.

One of the best parts of going to the Art Institute was the fact that you were actually just there in the galleries.

I had an etching class, for example, which was right upstairs.

You just went out sort of a back stairway from one of the main galleries.

Going to art school made it a routine, a habit to draw and to paint.

JOHN WILMERDING: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks is the most famous early 20th century American work in the art institute.

And Nighthawks has a glass window, it has figures seated at a cafe counter.

It's about reflections, it's about light and dark.

And of course, it's a touchstone for a lot of Richard's work.

In the permanent collection of early art, there would be a natural source for what finally shaped both his style, working methods and modes of composition, 18th century Italian art-- Bellotto, to an extent, but particularly, not surprisingly, Canaletto, with his precision, with his views of Venice, places that Richard had begun to visit.

Canaletto, I think his son-in-law was Bellotto.

I sort of prefer Bellotto, but Canaletto is by far the most famous.

I just consider myself an old-fashioned realist.

I think if Canaletto were living today and painting pictures, they would look a little bit like mine because that's what it looks like.

SPEAKER 1: You would never take your easel out and set it up on the sidewalk or even a sketchbook?

RICHARD ESTES: It would be a nightmare.

SPEAKER 1: Why is that?

RICHARD ESTES: Can you imagine, dealing with the wind, curious tourists, crazy people trying to get something or sell you something?

I don't even want anybody in my studio, let alone these outdoors with the whole world looking, for the most part, probably just ignoring me.

In New York you can do just about anything and nobody pays any attention.

These are my basic colors, about 12 colors I use.

Just started this a couple weeks ago, actually-- less, maybe.

It's about four days work, I'd say.

It's the under-painting.

It's just to get the drawing and the basic values and colors and the composition.

And once I've figured that out, then I order stretchers and stretch it, which means all these lines that I so carefully made straight sometimes get shifted around.

Because when you're stretching the canvas you toy with it, so it always has to be redone a little bit.

JOHN WILMERDING: Craft alone doesn't make a great artist.

It's the combination of intellect, of imagination, in the way he teaches you how to see and perceive the familiar in new ways.

His tricks of painting window surfaces that both reflect and are transparent simultaneously.

When you engage those passages, they're stimulating to the mind, to the brain.

HELEN FERRULLI: But then I came across another one that I was particularly interested in, about this-- RICHARD ESTES: This Spain.

HELEN FERRULLI: --car reflection.

RICHARD ESTES: Oh.

But it's upside down.

HELEN FERRULLI: Yes, I know.

But when I-- RICHARD ESTES: That's the way it should be.

HELEN FERRULLI: I know.

When I went to work for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, I went into the galleries and I said, the painting is upside down.

So they said, no, it wasn't upside down, but it was upside down.

RICHARD ESTES: Yes, all this is a reflection-- HELEN FERRULLI: Of that, yeah.

RICHARD ESTES: --of the wood, of the car.

You can see it's backwards.

HELEN FERRULLI: So have you had that happen with other of your works?

RICHARD ESTES: No.

It's sort of tricky, this one.

You can see why they'd make that-- HELEN FERRULLI: Mistake.

RICHARD ESTES: --mistake, actually.

HELEN FERRULLI: Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: When did you start becoming really interested in painting reflections?

RICHARD ESTES: Well, I think we were still living in the period of abstract expressionism.

And I was thinking, well, this is a way to sort of be abstract expressionist, and at the same time, super realistist.

PATTERSON SIMS: You see this single figure-- they're there, there, and there, three times, again, using reflection, which is terribly interesting to Richard.

In many ways, he always thinks that a reflection is somehow realer to him than the object that might be being reflected and the world around him.

And as you can see, he very carefully and meticulously paints the same level of detail of the undulating surface of the Flat Iron Building at the edge of that mirror.

RICHARD ESTES: Your eye tends to filter.

When you look at something, you decide to look at certain objects, and so your mind puts out all-- PATTERSON SIMS: The rest of the information.

RICHARD ESTES: --rest of it.

But that's what is actually out there.

Maybe that's what I meant if I said that the reflection is truer, because then it shows you everything.

But that's in the mind, it's not in the reflection.

PATTERSON SIMS: So the camera can do a better job of capturing reality than a memory can?

RICHARD ESTES: Well, yeah, in a way, because it focuses evenly on everything.

New York is the place to be.

Maybe that's why I came to New York, actually, not for art or anything, but to live the lifestyle.

You had to be more careful in those days.

I've had many relationships in my life, but I think the first serious one was with Jose Saenz, who I met in the '70s, around '71.

HELEN FERRULLI: I loved Jose.

Everybody loved Jose.

Jose was just an extraordinary person, so friendly and warm.

I mean, he was part of the scene.

RICHARD ESTES: I had a job with this advertising agency, and they fired me.

And so I got unemployment for about six months.

And finally I got enough money to sort of survive for a little bit, and so I did some paintings.

That's when I did these paintings which I took around.

I started on 57th Street, worked my way up, and was rejected by everyone until I got to Ivan Karp at Castelli.

And Ivan sort of was interested and Leo wasn't.

He said his other artists wouldn't approve of such a realistic artist.

Yeah, I really didn't fit in with any of the movements [laughs].

But I managed to get a show with Allan Stone.

And they sold out the show and that was it.

From then on, it was just clear sailing, I guess.

ALLAN STONE: Well, I was quite surprised when the work started to sell.

I mean, I was very gratified, but I was surprised.

It was so different.

Richard, don't forget, here you have this extremely photo realistic work being shown at a time when people were still talking about abstract expressionism.

The work was totally different from almost anything else that was around.

CLARE STONE: People were really taken with this work.

It was huge.

It was exciting.

The phone was ringing off the hook at the gallery.

People were dying to come in and look at the work, buy a painting, et cetera.

It was a big deal.

Richard was as surprised as Allan was, in a way.

It was having a tremendous impact.

RICHARD ESTES: I think maybe people had a hunger for realism or something, I don't know.

There was that telephone booths painting.

That started as an illustration that I was hired by the Reader's Digest to illustrate this book, which was called Vanished.

One of the scenes was just one telephone booth with a person calling.

But then I said, well, that might be an interesting painting, just sort of abstract and at the same time it's completely realistic.

There was one of an automat.

I decided at one point to give it to my mother who lived in California.

But in order to get it to California, it was too big to ship on the airplane, so I cut it into four equal parts so it was about the size of a suitcase and took it on the airplane with me.

And then when I got to California, took it out and put it back together.

And it stayed with my mother until she died, and then I brought it here.

I simply couldn't deal with the lithographic technique.

Saw some prints of the silk screen technique, and I think maybe that would be a possibility.

So we found this printer in Germany, Dogberger, and found out that, yeah, that's the way I would prefer to make prints.

HELEN FERRULLI: I first met Richard in 1971, and I was a Helene Rubenstein fellow at the Whitney Museum.

He was at the beginning of his career.

Richard was included in Jim Monte's 22 Realists exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which was a key factor in getting him out there in the public.

At the time that I was at the Whitney, it was Phil Glass and Laurie Anderson, people like that, and Richard didn't belong to those groups.

He kind of belonged outside of that, and he worked very well at that.

I mean, he had friends, Audrey Flack, and the photo realists, Chuck Close, and people like that.

LOU MEISEL: The photo realists, they have to work 8-10 hours a day to produce what they do.

They don't drink.

They don't smoke.

They don't get divorced.

They don't get into scandals.

They are a completely different breed of artist.

The photorealists are pretty much of the same generation.

Actually did exchange ideas, went to each other's openings, tended to know each other's work, remained friends, et cetera.

So there was more of a collegiality.

RICHARD ESTES: Salvador Dali was very encouraging towards me, actually.

He invited me and introduced me to all of these people, like the Wahol-type crowd.

I think every Sunday it was at Trader Vic's that was in the Plaza Hotel, and there would probably be 30 or 40 people.

He would line people up, talk to someone for a while.

And then he said, disappear, and somebody else would be put next to him.

I remember I was at the Dianelli at the Whitney.

Looked at my paintings, but he refused to look at any of the others, so that was rather flattering.

BRIAN ALLEN: Richard Estes is one of the great painters working today.

He's doing something that's very difficult, very challenging.

Very few artists can do it.

Hopper was a master of it.

He is a master of it.

He is what I call an "indoor-outdoor painter," which is very difficult to do.

He convincingly conveys the interior of the subway, at the same time this beautiful exterior of New York.

And one of the things I love about this is, and many of us have seen this monument, is his command of texture-- beautiful bronze, cold marble, beautiful, evocative sky.

PATTERSON SIMS: Richard, this 1979 painting of the Guggenheim is kind of a rarity in your work.

It seems to me very seldom do you paint an iconic architectural building on its own.

RICHARD ESTES: Well I think it's because I was commissioned.

PATTERSON SIMS: Oh, you were commissioned.

RICHARD ESTES: Commissioned to do it.

PATTERSON SIMS: How did that come about?

RICHARD ESTES: Most of the commissions I've had-- PATTERSON SIMS: Were early on.

RICHARD ESTES: --when they were finished, the collector had either changed his mind or her mind-- PATTERSON SIMS: And didn't want it.

RICHARD ESTES: --or had gone bankrupt or something.

[laughs] I did IM Pei.

Usually if you do a portrait of someone, they don't like it.

Somehow, nobody really knows what they look like, and they think they look different than what they really do.

And so it's almost impossible to satisfy them.

Well, here we are, Clare.

CLARE STONE: Hello.

Good to see you.

RICHARD ESTES: How many years ago was that?

CLARE STONE: Well, it was-- do you think 30?

RICHARD ESTES: It wasn't all that.

CLARE STONE: Now remind me of why this spot was so special.

RICHARD ESTES: Church painted his view of Cadillac Mountain, and it's in the Boston Museum.

I just saw it a couple of weeks ago.

CLARE STONE: Well, I have to go see that.

RICHARD ESTES: It's a small painting.

HELEN FERRULLI: Richard's appreciation of nature is as astute and scrupulous-- when he observes things in the city, he is really observing things in the city.

But after he moved to Mount Desert, he applied the same skills and observation to that geography as he did to New York.

JOHN WILMERDING: There were moments in his career when he painted landscape.

I think we tend to forget that.

The most important and most beautiful picture is in the earlier work of Central Park, where the figures are lounging on the edge of the lake, on the rocky shore, and you can tell that it's sort of a warm spring or summer day.

It's got what I would call Richard's subject matter-- that is to say, he's fascinated with light, there's water.

And that, for me, was the first real continuity that water is not that different from glass, it's another form.

Gave him, I think, a kind of way of beginning to paint around the main landscape.

To me, probably the greatest work he's painted here is the water taxi.

It's a wonderful painting where he was able to bring together the figures with a kind of interior.

And of course the water taxi has glass and plexi windows, so there's a Richard subject there.

CHRIS WILSON: Richard is very well respected in this area of Maine.

He's pretty private up here.

He prefers to be private up here.

He's kind of an uncle to me, really, at this point.

I've known him about 40 years or so now.

It was a summertime job, and it just grew into this huge maintenance nightmare.

[laughs] Jose was so large, a large person-- I don't know how else to describe it.

I mostly dealt with him.

I knew Richard on the side, and what I knew about him was from Jose.

RICHARD ESTES: I did a portrait of Jose when he was sick-- actually quite sick.

He was working in the garden and I took some photos and made a portrait.

Well, he just was not feeling well, there were strange things, and he just kept getting sicker and they didn't know what to do.

So we went and had the test, and he was positive.

He got AIDS and he died in '92.

I lost just about all my close friends to AIDS at that time-- everybody.

It was a wipeout.

HELEN FERRULLI: I remember after Jose died, I thought, he's never going to eat a good meal again.

But he took out the cookbooks and started learning how to cook.

And he's a pretty good cook.

I wouldn't turn down a meal if Richard invited me to dinner.

So his sense of curiosity is unparalleled.

RICHARD ESTES: One of the unique qualities I think is necessary for a painter, they have to work by themselves.

When I'm working, I'm by myself.

I don't want anybody around helping me.

I don't want to have a studio with assistants.

I just do it myself.

I'm not an art director.

I'm a painter.

CLARE STONE: One of the reasons Allan actually brought him up to Maine was because he cared about him enough so that he felt he wanted him to come up here and have more time to work and have a beautiful place to work.

And they made this amazing trade where the house that we had been living in, Allan decided that it might be something that could work for Richard, and they ended up trading.

And I can't remember the number of pictures he traded for the house.

I'm not sure.

RICHARD ESTES: I've probably been here 10 years before I actually did a Maine scene.

When I work, I really don't think about the subject matter that much anyhow.

It's usually just how to render things and sort of make it look like what it should look like.

It's like a basketball player whose challenge is going through the hoop.

My excuse for going is I'm looking for material to work from.

So I always take a lot of photos and I drew paintings.

JOHN WILMERDING: Richard loves to travel-- been to Japan, all over Europe.

One major connection is really water.

There are the paintings crossing Lake Champlain, the Sea of Marmara, the Venetian paintings.

RICHARD ESTES: If I'm traveling, I'll take off a month, because it's not practical to carry around a sketchbook.

I think I just don't enjoy sitting there with a bunch of people, all looking at you doing sketches or something.

Travel time recharges my batteries.

JOHN WILMERDING: He has, in fact, painted some of his very best New York pictures here in Maine, which leads one to realize, I think, that he's painting from memory.

He's painting from concept, from idea.

To me it's like an artist who's very much admired, Frederic Church, who also painted here brilliant studies, brilliant sketches.

But he went back to New York and painted in the studio and created what then were called great salon paintings.

In reverse, in a way, what Richard is doing here, which means the New York world where he began is now in his mind's eye.

RICHARD ESTES: Basically, I don't paint things because I think they're beautiful.

Sometimes it is, but a lot of times I don't find it the least bit attractive.

Maybe it's a way of dealing with ugliness.

You sort of execute the ugliness by turning it into something nice.

There's nothing beautiful about the massacres and executions you find it an awful lot of great paintings.

The most difficult part is to get everything the right value.

Because it's just a waste of time to work on a lot of details and then have it all too dark or too light, then so you have to do it over again.

So the first thing to do is sort of establish the lights and the darks.

The darks look like a dozen blacks, different grays, blacks, would all look the same if it's just on a white thing.

It's only when it gets all together that you can even see a lot of the values.

HELEN FERRULLI: Richard doesn't do a hard pencil sketch and finish it off to start a painting.

What Richard does is starts very loose and tightens up, and he tightens up as he goes along.

And it's much easier for him to work that way, and it's much faster, I believe, for Richard to work that way, but that's, I think, a very different approach.

RICHARD ESTES: Right now what I'm working on now is just the first layer, and it's the worst.

You just get everything basically laid out.

And then to finish it up, it gets a little more pleasurable and a little easier.

Even just deciding on what to do, I could spend a week just saying, oh, should I do this or should I do that?

LOU MEISEL: The bottom line is that Richard is still among the top three most famous photorealists, and he got that purely on the value and importance and beauty of his work, without anybody having to say anything.

That's what's remarkable about him.

Recently about a year ago we had a party, and Richard was here with a number of the newer realists who were just thrilled and fascinated that they could be here with Richard.

RICHARD ESTES: I have this little foundation where I invite different realists up to Maine, where we try, not necessarily, to do young pairs.

PATTERSON SIMS: Yeah, of course.

RICHARD ESTES: This emphasis, the way these galleries nowadays apparently are going off and looking for young stars all the time.

But to be a good painter, it takes probably about 12 years.

I started the Arcadia Foundation.

I've sort of modeled on the McDowell Foundation.

The idea was to provide artists with a studio and the opportunity to work.

I would invite artists to come and stay for two weeks to a month and just do whatever they wanted.

CLIVE SMITH: I had heard about his foundation, and so I got to go up in 2017.

So to have this opportunity for two weeks to leave my other work behind and work plein air up there in the countryside was amazing.

It's incredibly helpful for a younger generation of artists to work with such a great painter.

Even to see his easel is fascinating, because he works very differently from me.

So it's just incredible to see his working methods, and how he produces those paintings.

RICHARD ESTES: No, it doesn't get any easier and it doesn't get any faster, that I'm aware of.

In a way, my eyes aren't as good as they used to be either, and my muscles are not quite so steady.

HELEN FERRULLI: It's a discipline.

It's a real discipline.

Every afternoon, he's in his studio painting, so the idea that these things can be tossed off easily is not true.

He works, and he works very hard.

And he sometimes has to change things and he gets frustrated.

RICHARD ESTES: If I had an unsuccessful day, I'd feel depressed.

Just not quite right, so you have to do it over again.

CLARE STONE: One of the fun things about Richard's paintings is how he hides his signature.

And it's always a little bit of a guessing game to figure out, where did he put his signature in this picture?

And it's very clever, because it sometimes can take hours before you can figure out where it is.

PATTERSON SIMS: Signatures are hidden.

Sometimes they're hidden, as it were, in plain sight.

He just simply incorporates his signature at the bottom there, Richard Estes.

Or in this work, he incorporates the signature in a different way.

At the top of this building, Richard W. Estes.

RICHARD ESTES: I decided that these Picassos or Matisses with these great, big, sprawling signatures was not my way of doing things.

And in fact, I rather admired some of the medieval painters who would write down on some sort of scroll on the earth all of their names-- this was made by so-and-so.

So starting out with that, and since I'm doing all these signage in the various New York scenes, what better place to stick your name than in a restaurant menu or something?

HELEN FERRULLI: New York doesn't look like it did when Richard painted those pictures.

That part of New York is gone now.

It was a great moment.

RICHARD ESTES: I don't know, right now I'm thinking that maybe I'll emphasize just people more.

I've done enough store fronts and street scenes.

Now maybe I'll so more of an emphasis on figures.

It's a possibility.

I don't know.

I haven't really done it yet.

But it's funny, usually, at least with me, I end up thinking I'm going to do one thing and I end up doing something else.

Yeah, it's error and trial, I guess.

[laughs] [jazz music playing] [peppy piano jazz]