A small critique

Bob's skill, vision and paintings are unquestionably marvellous, and his ability to create them so quickly is a sign of a real genius - NOT everyone could ever do all that, even if they followed his instructions meticulously.

But one thing kind of strikes me - there is no accuracy. The reflections, for example, are NOT at all accurate - they don't make any sense, and in a way, they would be pretty 'impossible' in real life.

Also, the sunset light is actually dimmer than the radiated/reflected light on the scenery/bushes/hills/whatever. That is not possible. If I use a flashlight to light a bush, a paper or even a mirror, there is -no-way- that the light would be reflected BRIGHTER than the flashlight's beam! It's just not a possibility. Direct light should of course be always the brightest point of the painting, and wherever that light hits, should be dimmer - or -at-least- have the same brightness.

But this guy just happily paints brighter sceneries than the light (that lits them) is, and then completes it with reflections that do not make any sense (the trees are not reflected, the dark sides of the hills make bright reflections, and the round shape of the light is reflected as curvy and odd), as if he doesn't care at all.

I mean, are all painters like this? That they create just an 'impression' of a reflection, instead of trying to actually create a reflection? I have seen (not really 'read') a book called "100 Famous Views of Edo" - a really big, beautiful book - very unusual in that each page consists of multiple, thick ones (to preserve the art, I presume), and with a strange 'locking mechanism' on top.

In that book, I noticed the same mistake about the reflections - they depict a completely different scenery than what they are supposedly reflecting! Didn't painters ever care about the accuracy? How are we supposed to trust historical paintings, if they carelessly make mistakes like this? I know this sounds pedantic and anal-retentive, but I am not really blaming them or anything - I really marvel at their work - but it puzzles me, didn't any painter ever in human history even TRY to paint accurate reflections?

That's like an obvious thing to me - if I am going to create a scenery with reflections, I aim to make those reflections as accurate as I possibly can.

Not so with these Earth-painters (I am not going to explain this, but I am not going to lie about it, either).. they just create a great picture, and then make reflections that do not match at all, and don't even seem to care.

Now, anything goes in creative works, of course - there is the creative freedom of it all, and there's nothing necessarily wrong about any of that - I mean, if everyone simply painted everything meticulously to look exactly like it looks in the real world, that would be pretty pointless and boring, and we might just as well just use cameras.

(Not that Bob really paints very imaginatively either - it's just pretty ordinary Earth-naturestuff, without any 'surprise elements' from the depths of the imagination - like a zero-point energy generator in the middle of the lake or galaxies depicted in the sky (and those wouldn't even be -that- imaginative) - and maybe that is why it stands out so much - if he is going to just paint "reality", instead of "imagination", then why wouldn't he at least try to do it accurately? Otherwise, he could just paint -anything-, from purple-gold astral unicorns to time-traveling multidimensionality in quantum interference - or maybe even a "Higgs-boson"!)

But other than that, I must say that this man is a genius.

(Just wondering, whether it's some kind of a painter's code or something, to always paint every reflection as inaccurately as possible, or something)