The Life and Times of the Creatively Stunted

Of course, the week after I decide to re-start my blog things get busy. Sorry to those of you who have visited and found nothing new. I’ll work hard to rectify that over the coming weeks.

Song-a-Day will return next week with an all new theme, but today I’m debuting a new feature called “Discovered”, in which I post cool things I found on the internet. Our first venture is into that of trompe l’oeil, or visual art designed to “trick the eye”.

The above picture looks like a badly photoshopped image of The Thing running over an auditorium. In actuality, the image is painted directly on the walls and chairs using forced perspective. Below is the side view of this mural.

I was immediately fascinated by this. I have seen perspective pieces before (most memorably the “3D” chalk art of Julian Beever), but never one with the seeming complexity of The Thing. Plus, lets be honest here, it’s The Thing.

The piece was done by an artist named Justen Ladda in 1981 in an elementary school in the Bronx. It’s one of several amazing trompe l’oeil pieces done by Ladda between 1978 and 1993, several more of which can be found here.