A few days back, I blogged about scams that have ruled the better (or, in this case, worst) part of 2008. But today, as this year draws to a close, I’m referring to trickery of a pleasurable kind… visually pleasing, this art technique involves creating extremely realistic images in two-dimension, but they give you an illusion of 3-D paintings!
“Yeah!” as 15th century Dae Jang Geum would say with wonder-filled eyes and a beautiful smile, if she were to see 21st century chalk artist Julian Beever’s pavement art. The Belgium-based English artist paints murals and oils but is most famous for his anamorphic paintings created with a uniquely distorted perspective. I haven’t had the opportunity to see the original work of the old masters like Masaccio or modern masters like Salvador Dali who utilized this technique in some of their paintings, but I do recall seeing wall murals in old Quebec City with the same stunning effect that Beever conjures through his art on the streets of cities worldwide. Thanks to the internet, email “forwards” and “virtual” images, (even if one hasn’t had the opportunity to see his ‘real’ work) he is perhaps best-known for pavement art… from Birmingham to Buenos Aires; from New York to Australia.
Sad to say, though, a three decades old mural on 112-4 Prince Street in SoHo, NY, painted by architectural muralist Richard Haas, was vandalized with graffiti on it, earlier this year.
Here’s an image of what I saw a few years back and then again more recently last summer in Place Royale, Quebec. You can see other examples of trompe-l’oeil art even in Italy, France, Germany, the US and even in Cuba!
Words-n-Motion 