Project Two Artist's Statement

Trompe-l’oiel (French: “Trick the Eye”) is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects really exist, instead of actually being a two-dimensional painting.

Trompe-l‘oiel was once exclusively the domain of the painter. A painter could showcase his talents by creating a painting so realistically rendered, it fooled the eyes of the viewer into believing it was something it was not.
Now, trompe-l’oiel is the realm of the media artists. The appeal of photography, what makes it powerful to the viewer, is the belief that what is depicted in the photograph is real, truthful in a way that traditional art is not. People’s fascination with photography thrives as long as they believe that the camera never lies. Photographers know, however, that this is not the case. Just as Renaissance painters had to hone their craft in order to create the trompe-l’oiel effect, photographers have to hone theirs in order to make reality appear real. Whether it’s a photojournalist who has to frame the exact right scene, and expose the film at the exact right fraction of a second in time, or the studio photographer who must spend hours adjusting people, props, background, and lighting in order to make a staged shot look spontaneous, the photographer’s job is to transform years of practice into something that, to the viewer, appears to be as simple as everyday life.
For animation, an even more recent addition to the world of art, success of any degree depends on trompe-l’oiel. The medium itself depends on its ability to fool the human eye into believing that a succession of still shots is actually a moving picture. More than that, the success of the narrative established in the animation sequence depends on the audience’s suspension of disbelief, and a good animator makes his audience care so much about his characters and story that they forget that none of what they are watching is actually real.
For my short animation, combined all three mediums—painting, photography, and animation, in order to continue to explore my fascination with the role that reality and lies play in art. In the tradition of a popular form of painting trompe-l’oiel, I started with a painting that appears to have insects sitting on its surface. I then created stop-motion animation—taking each picture and then moving the insects a fraction of an inch, so that when all of the shots are played in succession, it appears as if the insects are swarming over the surface of the canvas. The insects return to their original positions so that, viewed in a loop, the animation would continue seamlessly.