PORTRAIT ART THAT IS REALISTIC AND COMPELLING.

PORTRAIT ART THAT IS REALISTIC AND COMPELLING.

PORTRAIT ART THAT IS REALISTIC AND COMPELLING.

ARMIN MERSMANN, born in Germany and now residing in Michigan, creates incredibly realistic eyes in graphite pencil. To the porous, wrinkle-filled faces to the glossy, captivating eyeballs themselves. Even the tiny hairs from the eyebrows are exacted with intricate detail and each have its own story to tell. His artworks are alive and they speak to us in a language that words alone cannot express. His interest is the aging skin and the breadth of textures within the human face that gives a hint of a life lived. While the detail present in his drawings makes them look incredibly realistic, there is still some intangible quality that sets them apart from a simple photograph or portrait. As the artist once said, “I find a good rendering is a drawing of what a person sees, I find a work of art is a drawing of what others don’t see. I look at small particulars of a person that cannot be seen or deciphered by the cameras, I delete, enhance, elaborate, exaggerate, alter and reinvent, and I do this by filtering this vision through my own psyche. Photo-realism itself does not interest me in the least; realism does, details and textures do, ultimately seeing what others fail to see, until they see it in my work.”