How This Artist Collapses Dimensions

[Narrator] Most painters work on a flat canvas

but not Alexa Meade.

I paint on people and three-dimensional objects.

I do it in a way that will make them look

like them a two-dimensional painting when photographed.

Looking at my work, it feels ambiguous

about where things lie in space,

and it's hard to wrap your head around

the dimensionality of it,

especially when you're just looking

at a two-dimensional image.

In video, you can start to see

some of the depth queues of parallax

and the movement of the camera

revealing more angles of the painting.

[Narrator] Meade calls her work Reverse Trompe L'Oeil

because instead of painting on a two-dimensional surface

to trick the eye and brain

into seeing a three-dimensional object,

she's flattening three dimensions into two.

This isn't forced perspective.

It works from every possible angle that you can approach it.

I paint on the back sides of things,

I paint on the underside of tables.

Every service within a scene

will be covered in a mask of paint,

and this mask of paint will reference

what's directly below it.

It'll exaggerate it or extenuate some minor details or flaws

that will give it that painterly edge

and really change the way

that you would perceive depth within a scene.

[Narrator] Interestingly, Meade never intended

to become an artist.

I didn't know that I'd end up being a painter.

I'd studied politics,

and that was my life path and my dream.

[Narrator] Meade's work has been exhibited

around the world including

at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

She's worked on advertising campaigns for Mercedes-Benz,

Ralph Lauren, and Lacroix watches.

And yes, those are her brushstrokes

on pop singer Ariana Grande.

I painted Ariana Grande

for her God is a woman music video.

That was inspired by a collaboration I'd done

with Sheila Vand where I painted Sheila's body,

put her in a pool of milk,

and the colors dissolved off into patterns all around her.

For Ariana Grande, I did a similar process

where I painted her and put her in a giant pool

of liquid paint.

[Narrator] But Meade is best known

for her dimension-collapsing style

of painting figures and scenes.

When I'm painting, I'm capturing a a mapping of light.

I paint in the shadows, I paint in the highlights,

and I exaggerate them and make the darks darker

and the lights lighter, which is quite counterintuitive.

A lot of people think that if I'm going to flattening space

that that must mean that I mean neutralizing the shadows,

that I'm perhaps painting the shadows lighter

to match with the rest of the environment,

and, in fact, I'm just doing the opposite.

By pushing them so far apart,

it makes it harder for your eye to see

where the natural shadows and contours are,

and instead you're just seeing my painted brush stroke

representation of the shadow.

I have to really follow the contours of the object,

and when it comes to clothing and the drapery,

I have to be really careful

that my brush doesn't disturb the drapery.

If I'm painting it on a mannequin,

I need to be sure that my brush doesn't dent

a peak in the clothing and then create a new area of shadow.

The way I apply paint

depends on the aesthetic I'm going for.

Often times, I'll dip my brush into multiple colors

and then just do these big strokes

that combine the brushstroke hair texture

of all these different colored striations going through it.

If I'm doing something in a street art style,

it'll often just be straight white

and straight black together and super high contrast.

I'll use brushes that you would normally see

artists painting with.

I'll also use giant brooms.

If I'm painting a wall that 36-feet wide,

and I have to make it look like an Impressionist painting,

I can't be using a brush that wide.

I need to have something that's on an eight-foot handle

and just sweeping it onto the walls.

The illusion is most effective when I am painting things

that have extreme depth to them.

The more an object is, the more startling the collapse

of space appears, whereas if I'm painting something

that has shallow depth and I try to flatten it,

you see that little bit of depth,

and it's not as convincing.

It's almost paradoxical that to really flatten something,

I have to start with something that has extreme volume.

[Narrator] Human bodies have a lot of volume to work with.

I use different paints on the skin

than I use for everything else.

There's usually very little surface area of the body

that I'm physically painting on.

It's usually just the face and the hands,

and, in that case, I am always using

on the body a special paint that is safe for the skin.

[Narrator] But learning how to apply paint to a person

to make it look like a painting of a person

took a lot of trial and error.

Earlier in my career as I was developing this style,

I wanted to see how lifelike I could make the paintings.

Sometimes if I paint a subject too smoothly

and too close to reality, there's an uncanny valley effect

where it just looks like a human

who's wearing too much makeup

rather than a painted portrait.

[Narrator] Her work can at times seem

like a Banksy style street art come to life

or an Impressionist portrait made real,

but that's because it's a collaboration with her models.

When a painter is painting on canvas,

they're capturing one particular expression of the model

or in cube isn't perhaps multiple expression at once,

but it's a single image and it's largely decided

by the artists how that person will be portrayed.

In my work, I'm painting physically on the person,

and so even though it might be my decision

where I'm putting down the brushstrokes

and the color palette, the human still shines through.

And in the photography, there's micro expressions,

there's the look in the eyes,

and something that's really fun about that

is that people are dynamic

and you can capture interesting things on video

that you might not ordinarily be able to capture

with a two-dimensional painting.

One of my favorite paintings was of a friend of mine

from high school who proposed to his girlfriend

as living street art, and that was a real proposal.

She had no idea it was coming,

and I'm really glad she said yes.

The painting was done was done

in a black and white street art style,

and the two of them walking down through

an alley in San Francisco

among all the street art blended in perfectly.

[Narrator] Amazingly, it was a class project

that kicked off Meade's artistic career.

It wasn't until end of my senior year of college

when I was about to graduate

with my degree in political science

that I developed this technique for painting on shadows,

and I realized there's something here, I have to follow it.

And I kept pushing it until finally,

I was able to make a three-dimensional space

appear two-dimensional.

Before that, I hadn't seriously done any painting,

I've never taken a photography course,

and I had to teach myself these skills

through the process of developing the illusion.

When I did my first experiments

with painting shadows on people,

I didn't quite understand what was going on

because when I photographed it,

my friend looked like he was two-dimensional painting.

I thought any camera I was pointing at it

was broken because it made no sense.

My friend was three-dimensional in from of me,

but on the screen, it looked like it was a work of art.

And I decided, I don't know what this is,

but I have to play with it

and see what happens and do more and develop it.

I remember showing my professor

the photos of my painted friend,

and he completely didn't get it and he told me that,

This looks like you could've made it Photoshop,

and if that's the case,

maybe you should've just made it in Photoshop.

He thought it seemed like a lot of extra work

to physically paint on a person

when I can get a similar effect doing something easier,

and I tried explaining to my professor

that that wasn't the point.

This is about painting light and shadow

and capturing within the space.

And I decided that I didn't really care

what he thought I needed to see for myself.

[Narrator] Since then, she's pushed her technique

developing ways to cover entire three-dimensional objects,

even rooms so that they appear to be flatten paintings

from any angle.

I'm interested in playing with perception,

creating something that looks one way,

but in reality, it's something completely different,

finding different layers to peel back and look through.

[Narrator] Meade's most recent work is a project

as one of Google's artists and residents.

She's painting an installation scene and props

for the tech company's Los Angeles offices

and later to be explored in augmented reality.

I'm working with Google to capture my artwork

using light field technology

so that the 3D nature of it in real life

can then be persevered digitally as well.

[Narrator] The capture can later be turned

into an immersive augmented reality experience,

but it wouldn't be a Meade piece

without another layer or two.

First, the installation was digitally mapped

using Google's deep view method.

We captured it with light field

and then we looked at what the digital depth maps

will look like of that space.

[Narrator] Different depths are represented

computationally in different colors.

It's what's known as a depth map.

I'm then taking that digital depth map

from the light field and painting it directly on top

of the space, and then we're going to be capturing that

again with light field.

It's quite meta, it's going from the physical 3D

to the computational photography's interpretation of the 3D,

painting that back onto reality,

and then capturing it once more.

Something's that's been surprising me is that

no matter what type of style I paint in,

the effect will still appear

to be a two-dimensional painting.

It's not reserved for Impressionistic style,

it also works in a street art style, a pop art style.

And now, in this project, I'm using a digital imaging style

of the classic depth map to turn it, not into a painting,

but into something that looks

like a two-dimensional computer graphic.

[Narrator] And, of course,

there will be a painted figure in the scene as well.

That's where Meade finds her work resonates most

with viewers.

There's aspects of the final image

that I'm able to influence

but not necessarily able to control,

and that has to do with how the model is holding themselves

in front of the camera.

That can do with the micro expressions,

the tension in the face, the look in the eyes,

and so much of that has to come forth through the model.

It's almost like a collaboration

because it's both parties coming together

to create this look.

[Narrator] In the future, Meade is hoping to push her work

with other collaborations.

I'm interested in collaborating with more scientists,

engineers, mathematicians,

people working in these different fields

to create artwork together.

[upbeat music]