Drugs, Microbes, and Antimicrobial Resistance

f America is to produce great painters, " wrote great American painter Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), young artists should " remain in America to peer deeper into the heart of American life " (1). Eakins traveled abroad, where he became familiar with the work of 19th-century greats Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas, but returned home to become a master of realism whose exactness and precision influenced many 20th-century American painters, one of them Richard Estes. Estes, a native of Kewanee, Illinois, grew up in Chicago and attended the city's famed Art Institute. Upon graduation in 1956, he moved to New York to pursue a career in graphic design as freelance illustrator for magazines and advertising agencies. In the next 10 years, he crossed over to fine art and had his first exhibit around 1968 (2). An admirer of Eakins, Estes peered deeply into the American cityscape for a new style of art, true not only to his native culture but also to his times. This style evoked the traditions of trompe l'oeil (fooling the eye through photographic illusion) and of 17th-century Dutch painting to create a contemporary version of reality (3). " When you look at a scene or an object you tend to scan it. Your eye travels around and over things. As your eye moves the vanishing point moves, " Estes said in an interview. " …to have one vanishing point or perfect camera perspective is not realistic " (4). Drawing from his surroundings rather than the imagination, Estes used photography to collect images or frozen moments of light on surfaces to complement his own recollection of places and objects. He did not reproduce photographic scenes. From multiple images, he selected certain elements, abstracting and arranging them to best advantage, exaggerating angles and omitting extraneous detail. This innovative perception and composition of visual reality came to be called superrealism or photorealism, a new art movement co-founded by Estes in the late 1960s (5). Photorealists, many of them influenced by Estes, painted varied images, portraits as well as landscapes, in exquisite detail. Their subjects were diners and storefronts, gum-ball machines, neon lights, pickup trucks, and other trap-pings of 1970s American life. Estes was captivated by the contemporary urban landscape, particularly of New York, where he has lived much of his life, although he has also worked in Chicago, Venice, and Paris. One in a long line of artists …