Atlanta and Savannah 1988

Glennray Tutor's 'Atlanta and Savannah' is a painting of two dolls, probably rendered in oil. Right away, I'm intrigued by his approach. It's like a high-definition folk art. The texture is smooth, almost like glass, and the details are so sharp they could cut you! It's like he's trying to make the unreal real, focusing on the material qualities of the dolls' dresses, the shiny metallic rocking chair. Look at the lace trim on those dresses! He's rendered it with such precision, such care. It makes you wonder about his relationship to these dolls, or to the act of representation itself. I think of Gerhard Richter, another artist obsessed with photo-realism, and the way he used that style to both capture and question the nature of images. Tutor seems to be doing something similar here, using hyper-detail to explore the uncanny nature of representation.