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Trompe-l'oeil - To Deceive the Eye

© Jo Murphy

"In French Trompe-l'oeil means to deceive the eye. It is a technique used in painting that is intended to deceive the spectator into thinking that the object perceived is real and exists in three dimension rather than being a two dimensional representation of it. (1) The intention is often to create humour and curiosity. People like to become involved in public art. The audience enjoys being tricked.

The painter may for example paint the mural in such a way that some of the architectural setting is real and some is painted. He may then ask the audience to guess which is real. John Pugh does just this on the entrance page of his website. You might like to see if you can guess which is reality.

 

For this type of art to be convincing is must be life size. (Spanish Island Ibiza.1200mm x 900mm.) A landscape must look as though you could walk right into it, a doorway must be convincing enough that you would attempt to walk through it. Mark Gerald  presents examples of this in his Portfolio.

To achieve this sense of reality artists use tools such as perspective, aspect, foreshortening texture and many others.

Perspective is a system for representing spatial recession on a flat or shallow surface.  In Western art perspective was developed in Florence in the early 15th century by Brunelleschi  and put into practice by artists such as Masaccio and Uccello. It utilizes such optical effects as the apparent convergence of parallel lines as they recede from the spectator to try to create in a picture an illusion of the same kind of spatial relationships that we see in the real world, with objects appearing to diminish in size the further away they are. This is called foreshortening. Such perspective was one of the cornerstones of European art for almost five centuries after its invention.(2)

Trompe-l'oeil can almost be described as 'super-realism'. The academic treatment of subject and light, precision and naturalism that is characteristic of Bierstadt's work.  Depth and perspective are achieved by applying a combination of colour and linear perspective. In linear perspective, objects become smaller the farther they are away from the viewer.  At the same time by applying colour perspective the illusion can be intensified. All objects get hazier and lighter as the distance increases. Shadows can be used to ground the object, while gradation of tone can indicate foreshortening. Objects, such as hills, will

Before Cafe

Window

Simple Perspective

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