Trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) is a form of still life painting where the representation is so close to reality that the viewer is tricked into thinking the actual objects are before them.

It’s not my main interest or goal, but I have done a few of these paintings.

Here’s a detail from one of them. A lot of care went into painting the red string – not as a solid line of unbroken color, but as a series of changing lightness and intensty, to give a feeling of real string twisting slightly in space.

Detail from “Boxed Bottle”, oil on panel, 15×5 inches.