World's largest 3D painting creates nifty optical illusion

Actors pose with gym equipment on what the Guinness World Records bills as the world's largest 3D painting, at Canary Wharf in London November this week. British artist Joe Hill's creation measures in excess of 1120 square meters, or 12,000 square feet. Guinness says it breaks records for the longest and largest surface area 3D painting. (REUTERS/Paul Hackett)

• [Alvis]

  Does it count for breaking the record if someone draws something with the same footprint but that appears deeper?

• [Stefan Jones]

  It is only “valid” to view these paintings from a limited area. When they are “displayed” do they arrange for a viewing platform and have a waiting  line?

  • [Alvis]

    Taking some mushrooms and viewing it from the opposite end is an equally valid option.

• [outercow]

  It’s a leap of faith, Indy.

• [MythicalMe]

  Not good for the person who suffers from vertigo. Very nicely done!

• [alex4point0]

  #occupypavement

  edit: this is a paid Reebok ad. It’s aaaaadvertising.

  See, they’re doing the fitness with the activity and the bouncing and the spraining, m’glayven

• [Bucket]

  Anyone have pictures of these things from other angles? I’m kind of curious as to what they look like that way.

• [eltiki]

  Looks like product placement as viral media.

• [BijouxBoy]

  Holy Moly!! The trolls are BACK. 

• [Greg Alder]

  Love this stuff

• [devophill]

  3d painting is 2d.

• [stib bits]

  What does gym equipment have to do with a frozen ravine? Oh wait, it’s an ad. Well done for giving Reebok a plug, it’s good  to see you helping out the little guys.

  • [flosofl]

    You mean like Reebok commissioning artists to do works like this? That kind of helping of little guys?

    Or was there something else you think you need to decide what money gets spent on?

    • [bo1ngbolnguser001]

      As long as you agree that paying photographers, video editors, and actors to create commercials is the same as ‘commissioning artists’.  Most of the advertising professionals creating commercials are not ‘the little guys’.

• [robuluz]

  Yes, it’s an ad. It’s a particularly fucking good one though, don’t you think?

  • [numpty]

    Not really, as it doesn’t make me feel inclined to buy any of their stuff.

• [Robert Cruickshank]

  Anamorphic painting != 3D painting.  

• [Jenny Reiswig]

  It’s amazing – those people are so realistic.

• [saurabh]

  I’ve long taken the stance that art done for commercial advertising, no matter how beautiful or clever, should not be given any appreciation. It’s prostitution of the worst kind – you’re taking enchantment, beauty, and delight and enslaving them for the purpose of selling some trainers. That is vile, vomitous and vexatious. Commercial advertising is one of the worst scourges we produced in the past century, one that deadens the soul and reduces the human being to a grasping, omnivorous beast – calling anything it produces “art”, and pretending that it can exist divorced from its hollow exhortation to consume is absolutely wrong. I am sick to death of everything, EVERYTHING – love, family, sunshine, nature, stars, memory, virility, childhood, innocence, all being brought around by advertising and chained to the need to buy some fucking piece of trash.

  • [CountZero]

    I’m sure there’s a large remote desert you can go live in to get away from it all. There will be no Internet or cellular access, so you can safely ignore all those nasty temptations, and at the same time stop with all the sanctimonious posturing.

    • [saurabh]

      There should be some sort of Internet rule about telling someone to go live somewhere else (a large desert, Russia, where you came from, etc.). I’m pointing out what I think is a problem with a particular aspect of society: I think advertising has a pervasive and evil influence on all of us. Ad men are literally mounting campaigns to construct individuals in certain ways in order to make them better consumers. If you think that there is nothing wrong with an entire industry being devoted to retooling human thought so that people have a greater propensity to buy makeup and sneakers, might I suggest that you are the one that belongs in a large remote desert.

• [Rolf Worth]

  I think it really is a frozen canyon with a mall built around it. , false advertising.

• [leandro]

  Ðis is not 3D, it is just good, old trompe-l’œil.

• [Petzl]

  This ad worked.   I went out and commissioned a 3D painting.

• [malpanka]

  @ saurabh two things -
  1. i don’t think commercial advertising is a 20th century invention. it existed many centuries ago, we just invented new media and forms for it.
  2. i am an artist myself and i love what i do and i put a bit of my heart in every work BUT i haven’t learned to feed on air yet. i really wish i could but sorry, being an artist is a job, a very demanding job. not a hobby that you can practice for free in your spare time. this man was lucky to get paid for an enormous work that i believe he really enjoyed doing. don’t call it prostitution, please.

  • [saurabh]

    Whether or not it’s possible to eat doesn’t change the fact that you’re selling what’s dear to you to the devil. Many artists starved and never sold a thing, but they painted anyway, not because it’s a job, but because they needed and wanted to paint and make art. And let’s not be confused, this man DID sell himself, and his work. It was not by his volition that he put “Reebok CrossFit” on the walls of his creation, it was because someone paid him to do so. I’m very sure he did not enjoy that piece of it; he was compelled to do it, the same way artists of previous generations were made to insert vainglorious patrons into their masterpieces and thereby spoil the composition. I’m sorry that the world doesn’t allow artists to eat well without subverting their desire – god knows this affects me and mine as well. Unfortunately there is no identity between what’s morally correct and what allows you to live comfortably.

    As to commercial advertising, no, it’s not a 20th century invention, but we certainly expanded its invasiveness, and turned the manipulation of public will via advertising into a science. I doubt that before the 20th century, ad men were running focus groups to determine how to best snare the consumer, or studying the consumer’s psychology, and their existential needs, and figuring out how to make those things serve their bottom line. See, say, the Marlboro Man. Books existed before the printing press, also. They just weren’t produced by a machine.

• [eagleclaw101]

  Although its Joe Hill’s wonderful creation of world’s largest outdoor 3D paintings but, seemingly it only favors limited viewing angle as suggested by this pictorial shoot.  

  • [numpty]

    As do all 3D pavement paintings.