His most characteristic paintings and prints depict roadside diners that seem to capture the spirit of America.

This popular artist was born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1938, and studied at Auburn University in Alabama.

As GERRIT HENRY commented in his book Super Realism: A Critical Anthology (Dutton 1975); In Photo-Realism reality is made to look so overpoweringly real as to make it pure illusion: through the basically magical means of point-for-point precisionist rendering the actual is portrayed as being so real that it doesn't exist. What does exist off the canvas is the mind which conceived of the idea of the painting of a photograph of reality in all its intrinsic implausibility. Whereas classical painters through the ages have idealized reality itself the classical New Realists have totally devalued reality in order vastly to overvalue (in other words completely abstract) the human brain. Photo-Realism is basically not realism at all. More correctly it is the plastic offshoot of today's conceptual arts.