Questions

I wasn't completely certain upon looking at Amy Bennett's paintings, but doing some research on her website confirmed my hunch: Bennett paints her scenes from detailed miniature models that she has constructed. The fact that her paintings obviously looked like they'd referenced a teeny tiny model both bothers me and intrigues me. For all their believability, the paintings don't look like depictions of real people and places--they actually look like paintings of fake foliage and water, of plastic, static people and artificial weather. The more I think about it, the more I can't decide how I feel.
Of her work, Bennett says, "The paintings are glimpses of a scene or fragments of a narrative. Similar to a memory, they are fictional constructions of significant moments." I love this idea--a lot of my own work is actually inspired by the same theme. But the fact that the paintings don't look like "real" moments but moments clearly derived from a miniature model puzzles me. Is Bennett painting the abstract idea of "significant moments" or is she simply painting a physical diorama that she's constructed? Or both?
What do you think?