There are some things that could be achieved by a camera, yet if one looks deeper within the composition and begins to observe where technical accuracy begins to merge with the flourish of the artist's hand, is there something that can be revealed by the artist's eye and imagination that can't be achieved by the photograph? Would subtle nuances within the subject be lost if the flourish of the artist's hand became too stylized?

The artist has stated that she sometimes combines several reference photographs to create a singular composition; she also invents parts of the composition without photographic reference. The subject matter alone is something many people have never experienced seeing in the external world, so there remains the possibility that some of what the artist invented from imagination the viewer might take as faithful documentation rather than a layering and merging of variables.

Look at The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak by Albert Bierstadt and a less aesthetically idealized version of the landscape. Also, compare similarities with Sunrise on the Matterhorn. Albert Bierstadt fused two separate mountain ranges.

I am not trying to convert you into becoming an advocate of meticulously rendered artwork over any other visual expressions. The Abstract Expressionists are some of my favorite painters; however, even Jackson Pollock went back into his some of his paintings and carefully painted around spontaneous gestural marks to preserve them and remove undesired effects.

I suppose the basis for evaluation in regard to accuracy of life would depend on which characteristics are being judged when comparing technical aspects of painting from life to photography.

Aside from two of the often used comments about photography in that lights become homogenized and darks tend to flatten out. The camera would tend to interpret the closely related varieties of blues in the iceberg as a single color and some would be reduced to blacks, which happens even more so with greens in the landscape. Depending on focal length the camera can also compress spatial relationships between formations, whereas the eye can judge distances between layered clusters of crags. When these things occur in a photograph, the painter can use knowledge of how to model a three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface to enhance those distances.

The variety of textures on the surface of the iceberg creates a range from smooth planes to massive rugged crags, some with soft rounded edges that start to swirl to firm angular edges that appear as if they were slowly honed to a sharpness from their contact with wind and water or snapped abruptly by the same forces of nature. An accumulation of rough fragments that gather toward the base are residual evidence of sections that have crumbled and broken off the once larger mass. The fragments are offset by a smooth, frozen cascade of slowly melted ice on the surface most directly in the light, which speaks to yet another force of nature. The reflected highlights help to reinforce one type of surface condition while simultaneously having a surface that experiences subsurface scattering of light.

The focal accommodation of the eyes allows the artist to expand variations between edges, as mentioned with the textures; retain color within shaded areas to greater extent before arriving at the threshold of black; and adding some detail in areas of reflected light.

Also, consider scale and mark making as part of the overall visual experience. A pastel painting of that size viewed from its optimal viewing distance (or in many cases a minute, smaller than postcard sized electronic image) appears to strike a highly refined sense of naturalism, yet when viewed at a closer distance there are blends of color and surface textures that can only be achieved by subtle transparent overlays of color and tone or a caking build-up pigment that can sometimes reveal a more visceral application of the medium and a bit of stylization even if they are just variables of a constant.