Jason de Graaf: Hyperrealist Acrylic Paintings of Glass and Reflections

At first glance they look like studio photographs: polished spheres, glass and gleaming objects, each surface holding a perfect miniature reflection of the room around it. Every one of them is a painting. Canadian artist Jason de Graaf builds these scenes in acrylic, brushstroke by brushstroke, until the illusion is complete.

Who is Jason de Graaf?

Jason de Graaf was born in Montreal in 1971 and lives and works in Vankleek Hill, Ontario, a small town between Montreal and Ottawa. He studied with the hyperrealist painter Carmelo Blandino, who likens the discipline of the craft to a Buddhist practice.

De Graaf works in acrylic, a medium that dries fast and is less forgiving than oil for smooth, seamless gradients. He sums up his aim as "the illusion of verisimilitude on the painted surface". His work has been featured in Nancy Reyner's book Acrylic Innovation, in the Daily Mail and in the Huffington Post, and it appeared in group shows such as "Au-Delà du Réel / Beyond Realism" (2012) and "Hyperrealism" (2014).

He is represented by Galerie de Bellefeuille in Montreal and Toronto, Jacana Gallery in Vancouver and Plus One Gallery in London. Galerie de Bellefeuille gave him a solo show in Montreal in December 2015, and he was a finalist for the Kingston Portrait Prize the same year.

Hyperrealism: painting beyond the photograph

Photorealism emerged in the late 1960s, when painters began copying photographs with mechanical precision. Hyperrealism, the generation that followed, pushes further. It still starts from close observation, but the artist adds emphasis, staging and narrative, so the result feels sharper and more deliberate than a camera image.

De Graaf belongs firmly to this tradition. He arranges his objects like actors on a darkened stage, each with its own role. The process is slow and painstaking, since every highlight and every distorted reflection has to be worked out and laid down by hand.

Reflections, glass and spheres

Shiny surfaces are the heart of his work. A curved mirror-like sphere holds a bent, compressed view of everything around it, so a single object can open a second space inside the picture. Writers have compared the effect to the shimmering, impossible spaces of M. C. Escher.

Several of his best-known paintings are built around this idea. In Amulet, a glass sphere at the centre sets the perspective for the objects arranged around it. Lux Brumalis, Latin for "winter light", shows silvery spheres reflecting trees, suspended above a cold, smooth surface. Cultivated places red cranberries on a white table with a glass decanter and a pair of white earbuds, a modern twist on the classic still life.

The reflections also carry personal meaning. De Graaf treats them as windows into another dimension, and the objects he chooses often work as notes or memories.

The paintings in this selection

The works shown here are Untitled, Parallel Lines That Never Meet, Tandem, Citadel, A Perfect Day In Which Nothing Really Happened, Pachyderm’s Dilemma and Ice Palace. His titles are part of the experience. A phrase like "Parallel Lines That Never Meet" or "Pachyderm’s Dilemma" hints at a relationship or a small story among otherwise ordinary objects, and sends you back to look again at what each reflection reveals.

For more art that plays with how we read an image, see these rendered relief maps of the world's mountain ranges and these photographic night-sky composites.

Related reading

• Jim Denevan’s 2010 Lake Baikal Snow Circles: Geometry on a Frozen Lake
• Simon Beck’s Snow Art: Walking Geometry into Winter Landscapes
• Matthew Albanese’s Strange Worlds: Landscapes Made in Miniature
• The Bartz Brothers’ 2014 Snow Shark and Earlier Sea Creatures
• Zaria Forman’s Greenland Icebergs in Pastel
• Andres Amador’s Earthscapes: Geometry, Rakes and the Changing Beach

Sources