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   I remember being mildly horrified the first time someone said to me, with great admiration, "Your painting looks just like a picture!"  At first, this compliment rather baffled me until I realized that my painting's sense of verisimilitude had impressed its admirer as being almost photographic; like a "picture".

  The fact is, that we are so used to 'reading' photographs, and are also so convinced of their supposed fidelity to nature (even with the increasing prevalence of digital manipulation), that we unintentionally hold them up as yardsticks to every realist painter's vision.

   Although the majority of my landscape paintings are highly detailed, they are not meant to conform to the confines of strict Photorealist painting.  The priority for me has always been the creation of a convincing illusion that makes my visual point, and any photographic source material (often from multiple views) is always subservient to the necessities of that vision.  Each painting, then, is the result of some degree of transformation of the original source.  In some works the evolution may appear dramatic and in some rather minimal, but the significance is that the painting is based on an my  emotional reaction to a particular landscape, quality of light, or time of day, and is never simply an attempt to recreate the surface reality of any photograph.

                                                                 Gary Godbee

Some quotations for thought:

   "A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view."                                                                                                                   Henry David Thoreau                                                                             

      "A work of art does not appeal to the intellect.  It does not appeal to the moral sense.  Its aim is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion."
" Every artist who, without reference to external circumstances, aims to represent the ideas and emotions which come to him when he is in the presence of nature, is in process of his own spiritual development…"
                                                                                                                                  George Inness                                                                     

   "My aim in painting is always, using nature as the medium, to try to project upon my canvas my most intimate reaction to the subject matter as it appears when I like it most; when the facts are given unity by my interests and prejudices.  Why I select certain subjects rather than others, I do not exactly know, unless it is that I believe them to be the best mediums for a synthesis of my inner experience."     Edward Hopper


   "Art is not only a form of action, it is a form of social action. For art is a type of communication, and when it enters the environment it produces its effects just as any other form of action does."     Mark Rothko


   "The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings.  There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.  This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist."                                              Ernest Becker ("The Denial of Death")


   "In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.  How will that come about, and what will we really find?  It would be interesting to be able to prophesy, but it is even better to be able to feel that kind of foreshadowing, instead of seeing absolutely nothing in the future beyond the disasters that are all the same bound to strike the modern world and civilization like terrible lightning, through a revolution or a war, or the bankruptcy of worm-eaten states. 
    If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what?  In studying the distance between the earth and the moon?  No.  In studying Bismark's policy?  No.  He studies a single blade of grass."                                  Vincent Van Gogh