Prompts

Trompe L’oeil . . . Prompt #716

Art by David Zinn

Writing Prompt: Trompe l’oeil

Trompe l’oeil is a French phrase that means “deceive the eye.”

It’s used to describe a style of painting that uses shading and perspective to make a two-dimensional painting appear to be three-dimensional. Wikipedia


From Webster’s Dictionary:

1. A style of painting in which objects are depicted with photographically realistic detail.

2. Something that misleads or deceives the senses, illusion.

Examples of trompe l’oeil: Creative Blog

Write about: Trompe l’oeil.

Artist David Zinn has been creating original artwork in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan since 1987. For more than twenty years, he freelanced for a wide variety of commercial clients while simultaneously sneaking “pointless” art into the world at large.

His professional commissions included theatrical posters, business logos, educational cartoons, landfill murals, environmental superheroes, corporate allegories and hand-painted dump trucks, and his less practical creations involved bar coasters, restaurant placemats, cake icing, and snow.

Now, thanks to the temptations of a box of sidewalk chalk on an unusually sunny day, Mr. Zinn is known all over the world for the art he creates under his feet. David’s temporary street drawings are composed entirely of chalk, charcoal and found objects, and are always improvised on location through a process known as pareidolic anamorphosis or anamorphic pareidolia.

Most of Zinn’s creatures appear on sidewalks in Michigan, but many have surfaced as far away as subway platforms in Manhattan, village squares in Sweden and street corners in Taiwan. He has achieved global notoriety through sharing on the pages of FacebookInstagram, Huffington Post, Graffiti Art Magazine, Bored Panda, Central China Television, Street Art Utopia, and Archie McPhee’s Endless Geyser of Awesome.

His most frequent characters are Sluggo (a bright green monster with stalk eyes and irreverent habits) and Philomena (a phlegmatic flying pig), but the diversity of Mr. Zinn’s menagerie seems to be limited only by the size of the sidewalk and the spirit of the day.

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