As it has been confirmed over and over again, sometimes there is much more to the eye than you can initially perceive. This specially goes for the items that have been featured on Mighty Optical Illusions website. Today’s featured artist comes from Ukraine, and is widely recognized because of his illusory oil paintings. His name is Oleg Shuplyak. The gallery you’re about to see hides a surreal world once you take a look at it more closely. Through carefully placed objects, characters, coloring and shadows, there is a second image in the painting which creates an optical illusion.

I’m not sure whether this artist was more influenced by Sandro Del Prete’s opus or works done by famous Octavio Ocampo, but those of you following this website for some time will immediately notice the resemblance! Just like Sandro, Oleg’s works usually feature a portrait of famous personalities. Go through the gallery below and see how many of them can you recognize. Van Gogh, Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali are just few among dozens.

With works like these, it’s sometimes hard for the author to balance the weight of both images. Personally, I’m more fond of illusions where the “constructed”, 2nd image is more subtile. Oleg on the other hand, does quite opposite – The second image is so easily observable in some paintings, that you can actually miss the first one consisting of harmless landscape or characters in different settings. What you have to do then, is observe the painting more closely to actually see the initial setting and not concentrate on the faces. True skill of such artist is then evaluated by the fact how well did he construct the illusion, and whether the parts of landscapes constructing the illusion have useful part in the original setting. Artists often trap themselves by forcefully adding elements needed to construct the illusion, which don’t actually play their part well in the original setting. In my opinion, Oleg has mastered the technique just like Sandro did, and each part in his paintings seamlessly works in both images, the first “apparent” one, as well as the “hidden” illusory one. So, how many faces did you recognize? Which of his paintings did you like the most?



