Agamemnon

The look takes a room anybody would recognise and paints it with the attention usually saved for something important. A kitchen table, a chair under a window, somebody doing nothing in particular.

The gap between the plain subject and the careful paint is where it works. Hand it a dramatic subject and the paint has nothing to argue with, so the frame reads as ordinary illustration.

Warm palette, deep golden light, and brushwork you can see. Edges soften where the paint moves, and the flat areas carry the direction of the strokes rather than an even fill.

The light behaves like one window late in the day. It falls across part of the room and leaves the rest in warm shadow, which gives the paint somewhere to sit thick and somewhere to sit thin.

Composition stays quiet. A level camera, a centred subject, nothing arranged for effect. The realist painters this borrows from built their pictures the same way, and the stillness is part of the read.

Use it on a domestic scene you want treated with weight. Somebody eating, reading, waiting by a door. It suits a held shot with very little movement in it.

Skip it for action, for night exteriors, and for anything already dramatic. The look has nothing to add to a scene that is shouting.

Hard Light is a lighting choice and this is a painted surface. A hard light frame is still a photograph, with a small source cutting a sharp shadow edge. Here the photograph is gone and paint has taken its place.

The check is texture in the flat areas. Brush marks across a plain wall mean paint. A smooth wall with a crisp shadow on it means you asked for a lighting style instead.

The model reaches for a dramatic subject, because dramatic subjects are what paintings usually carry. Name the mundane thing you want: a bowl on a table, a person pulling on a coat, a made bed.

The other failure is a photograph with a paint filter laid over it. Ask for visible brushwork and soft painted edges, and ban photographic detail, so the surfaces are rebuilt rather than coated.