dave beck

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The Faithful Colt (After William Harnett)

The Faithful Colt, by William Harnett (1890)

portfolio > trompe l'oeil

Trompe l'oeil Series (After William Harnett)
Framed 3D Digital Prints on Canvas, dimensions vary, 2007

I’ve always had an interest in the American still-life painter, William Michael Harnett (1848-1892).  He was famous for his reinvention of the Trompe L’Oeil (“to fool the eye”) style of still-life painting.  Harnett’s paintings of objects from the life of the bourgeois class were rumored to trick viewers into thinking that it was not a painting on the wall, but actual objects hanging in front of them.  Although he lived more than a century ago, Harnett was living my dream – he was creating a reality that wasn’t there, through his struggle for perfection, deception, and representation of desired objects. Harnett utilized illusionistic techniques by demanding that his viewers straddle the fence between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional world.  With Harnett as my guide, I have aimed to perform a Trompe L’Oeil – leading the viewer into a new realm of alternative representation, channeled through digitally rendered images that reference 1980's corporate culture.