>>5939626There's an entire spectrum of emotional conveyance out there for you. Images that present a sense of melancholy, or sadness, or happiness, or even nostalgia, as the Impressionists sought around the advent of the camera and the beginning of what they saw as the death of realistic portraiture.
Beyond that, interesting concept--showing someone something that they've never seen before and can see nowhere else, oft the domain of fantasy illustrators, concept artists, and futurists or architects or designers like Syd Mead or Antonio Sant'Elia.
Statements vary widely, too, and can range anywhere from political propaganda as is seen in various agitprop movements to "statements" in the sense of combining aesthetics with narrative, the domain of animators and comic artists.
People want art that they can "latch onto" emotionally in some way. That can be as simple as "I wish that were real!" or it can be something as deep as tapping into an emotion that they rarely feel or a powerful memory they have. Sure, if something looks really, really out-there and cool and stylistic and flashy that can be enough of an emotional draw in and of itself (action anime often rides off of this draw almost exclusively), but chances are strict realism is not going to get you close enough to that level of visual spectacle. You need to make some edits; provide colors or shapes or ideas that just aren't present in our day-to-day lives.
People like art that reflects their feelings, tells them a story, looks different from their reality, or transports them somewhere new. A "good drawing of a dog" or a "good realistic portrait of a Dutch trader" lacks strong emotional hooks, and thus gets little more than a "wow, the guy who drew this is really good" before being promptly forgotten.
