Artist and wood carver extraordinaire Ron Isaacs has created a series of works that combines trompe l’oeil painting with exquisite wood carving. Trompe l’oeil is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in 3 dimensions. Using layers of Finnish birch plywood, Isaacs carves designs on which he paints in a trompe l’oeil style. His series includes recurring motifs: vintage clothing and plants and inanimate objects. He incorporates his interest in botany in the design of the vintage clothing, constructing delicate details of leaves and twigs growing out of the fabric. The different textures combined enhances the heaviness the fabric appears to be and the soft and lightness the plants appear to have. It is amazing how Isaac shows this through his painstaking carvings and paintings (despite his artwork being made of the same medium). 

Issacs explains in an artist statement that his motifs “combine in appropriate or surprising juxtapositions, sometimes purely as a visual “poem” of sorts and (if I’m lucky) sometimes as an image with real psychological resonance.” 

See an entire gallery of his work at Snyderman-works galleries and the Tony Folliard gallery.  

via thisiscolossal