Prepare to be blown away. At first glance, the figurative paintings above, by Washington, DC artist Alexa Meade, seem like beautiful, colorful portraiture. Alexa captures her subjects with bright colors and heavy brush strokes, but wait...the hair looks SO real. Too real. That's because it is. In fact, this isn't a flat painting on canvas...it's an actual person sitting in a chair, who has been painted to look like they are in an actual painting. Make sense? No. Well, take a look at the pictures at the bottom of this post to see what I'm talking about.
Alexa has innovated a Trompe-L'Oeil painting technique than can perceptually compress three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional plane. She paints her representational image directly on her three-dimensional subjects. Her work is an impressive combination of installation, painting, performance, and photography. All of Alexa's work, the hours spent creating these images, is gone in a matter of hours (or however long it takes the model to jump in the shower and scrub the paint off their bodies). What remains after the scene has ended is a photographic reminder of what was. It serves as documentation of the performance.
Are you blown away? I thought so. To see more of Alexa's impressive work take a look at her website.
