The “photoreal” paintings (this has to be placed into inverted comma’s because there not really very close to photoreal at all, a lack of descriptive vocabulary on my part) are images of hope.  G. Richter spoke about his landscape paintings as a speech which is beautifully crafted and emotionally stirring but which ultimately says nothing ie. they speak about the object of the photo rather than the romantic landscape depicted.  The intention of Figure/Fragment (I’ll use this as an eg.) was nearly the same.  I used the photo as a device for objectivity which in turn negates the emotional content of the image, the romanticism of the image, of what is essentially a very tradtional view of the woman as object, looking longingly into the distance.  However, painterly aspects intrude on the image and thus the painting becomes about the efforts to balance, to unify, the whole.  Hope enters the image in my failure to extinguish the painterly elements and attain objecthood.  For a painting of this type to work beyond the photoreal works of Richters the necessity is for the image to straddle the gap between his landscapes and his abstracts.  It was suggested that his abstracts were the paintings which dealt with this declamation without substance, however, Richter rejects this notion, suggesting that the abstracts are about finding new ways to create an emotional response, rather than simply the declamation of past techniques at the death knell of painting.  This is life affirming stuff.