THE VOLCANO'S VISUAL ARTS CRITIC WEIGHS IN >>>

Trompe le'oeil is a nice little, hard-to-pronounce French word. Literally it means "Fool the eye." As an art term it means art that makes you think it's real and not a painting. The phrase originated in the Baroque period (roughly the 16^th and 17^th centuries) but actually goes back to earlier Greek and Roman murals. Trompe le'oeil paintings were very popular in the 19^th century, but they simply do not work as paintings any longer because viewers have become far too sophisticated and cynical to buy into the trick of making part of a painting look like it's extending beyond the painting. It's paintings' version of 3-D movies. Been there, done that.

But trompe le'oeil can still be artistically effective when used in the way the ancient Greeks and Romans did - in murals. Because in murals the painted images interact with the natural environment in ways that are not possible in framed paintings on a wall. The most effective Trompe le'oeil murals picture urban scenes similar to those in the real world surrounding them, such as paintings of buildings and cars or maybe the painting of a tunnel on a wall, which I have seen pictures of and which can be very dangerous because some fool might try to drive through it.

There is a very good mural on the flat wall of the old North Wilkesboro Hardware Store in Olympia, now the Lowe's store on Martin Way. It's a painting of buildings and a street with an early 1940s Dodge pickup traveling on it by Larry Kangas. It's best seen from the Safeway parking lot next door. I often shop there and even after seeing the mural for years I am sometime thrown for a loop when I glance over and for a moment can't distinguish the surrounding buildings and cars from the painted buildings and the old truck. It's disorienting in a fun way. Usually the only giveaway is that (1) the truck never moves and (2) the actual sky and the painted sky are usually not the same color, depending on how cloudy or sunny it might be.

There are more Trompe le'oeil mural images here and more fun ones by John Pugh here.

As for paintings in frames and hung on walls there is only one artist who has ever done them effectively as meaningful art and not just as visual trickery, and that is the great trickster Rene Magritte. The thing that makes Magritte's paintings so interesting is that he knows it is a trick and he presents his trick paintings in the manner of the Wizard of Oz with the curtain open so you can see he's just a fat little man full of tricks. Among Magritte's most famous "fool-the-eye" paintings is one of a naked woman standing in front of an open window in which the top half of her body becomes part of the sky seen through the window, and another one - actually many versions of this one he's done - is a painting of a sky resting on an easel in front of an open window so that the view out the window and the painting become one and the same. The thing that makes his paintings great is not just that the visual tricks work well but that his paintings are comments on the trickery and on the nature of art and illusion.

I just wish Kangas' mural on the Lowes building was as sophisticated and as tongue-in-cheek as a Rene Magritte painting, but then I don't guess he could get away with painting a 20-foot tall naked woman on the side of a building on Martin Way.