Return of Trompe L'Oeil

What Does it Mean? How Does it Work? And How in the World Do You Pronounce it?

Let's start with #3...it's pronounced "trômp ˈloi", which is French, meaning, "Trick the eye."

What Does it Mean? According to Wikipedia, "It's an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three-dimensions, instead of actually being a two-dimensional image."

How Does it Work? That's the hard part. Our artists know that to successfully create the three-dimensional illusion the entire floor of the background has to be painted with exaggerated brush strokes, rendering the appearance of objects as common as a suitcase completely unrecognizable. Railway tracks have to bend, an asteroid is stretched to the breaking point, and marble pillars curve. When the camera lens sweeps across the floor, suddenly the suitcase, stretched across the vertical and horizontal planes of the background, becomes a real suitcase, the railroad tracks and the pillars straighten, and the asteroid becomes round again.

Here's an image of 3D106 (Call Me Flowers), stretched out, as it was painted, laid out flat. Click here to see the completed transformation, courtesy of Peg Buckner, in Fallon NV.