He said his realism is “not a copy of nature, although lots of people think so. But let them think so, it's alright. But the realism is something else. First of all, you have to know what a thing looks like, what a thing is made of…I studied the things that I painted, I studied the trees, I'd go and look at them up close and then when I would go back I'd try to simplify by a line or two. It doesn't always come off. But you try awfully hard to make a thing look as though it was casual. But I don't think there is anything casual in art.” He said the goal of his carefully planned still life paintings is to make the objects within “as absolutely alive as possible…even more alive than they really do look like to you when you are looking at them.” Asked how his work compares to photography, Lucioni replied: “I don't think it compares with photography at all. People say, ‘Oh you can take a photograph and make it ... [https://paintinglifestories.blogspot.com/2013/04/luigi-lucioni.html]