Art Technique: A Case Study

Most of us are familiar with an artistic technique called trompe-l'oiel. Taken from the French words for "fool the eye", the term refers to paintings or other artworks that are so realistic that they fool the viewer's eye into thinking that they are the real thing. We see a garden scene created with trompe-l'oiel technique and we want to reach out and pick the flowers, dabble our feet in the creek, duck behind a column to avoid a rather angry-looking bumblebee.

The Southern California city of Laguna Beach each summer reverses this process. Instead of making painted surfaces seem as real as life, living human models are made to look like paintings and other forms of art.

You could say that it was a case of life imitating art.

The occasion for this annual transformation is the "Pageant of the Masters", a full-length program of tableaux vivants that each year accompanies two annual art festivals. Laguna Beach is located in Orange County, certainly better known for its theme parks like Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm. But Laguna Beach is a city that is home to a very high number of artists, many of whom make their living by painting and photographing the beautiful scenery of this part of the California coast, and so it is appropriate that the summer amusements here should center on Picasso and not Mickey and Minnie.

Tableaux vivants are simply "living paintings" made up of models who pose as motionlessly as possible to create a scene that lives for a moment and then, as the

nt as well. The make-up artists who apply the carefully plotted face designs each night are all volunteers, as are the models and nearly everyone else involved in the production. Just as everything with the make-up is larger than life, the costumes for the Pageant of the Masters are more flamboyant than the costumes that an actor would typically wear on stage. The costumes for the tableaux vivants have to have the same ability as any stage costume to be seen equally as well from the front row of the outdoor arena where the pageant takes place as from the back row almost 75 yards away, but they must also look as if they were created from paint, metal or glass, depending on the piece of artwork that is being reproduced. Once the models for a piece are properly costumed and made-up, they step into the gaps in the sets, where they are often affixed by Velcro strips or where they hold onto hidden hand-holds or steps. Then the whole set is wheeled onto stage, a mysterious combination of cool and bright lights is brought up, music and narration are added, and you would bet a goodly sum of money that what you are looking at was an actual artwork, somehow made bigger and brought to motionless life. This gee-whiz factor is certainly one