John Pugh's Amazing Murals

John Pugh is a "trompe l'oeil" artist, focused primarily on mural painting. As you can see from below pictures, they look as real as reality ;) but they are "only" paintings!

Cafe Trompe L'oeil
San Jose



If you are not convinced, maybe you should take a look at the wall from the time while this amaying mural was in progress:

Note that, no matter how cool and incredible these pieces of art might look, some of them caused mishaps and incidents, such as Taylor Hall, CSUC:

1. Soon after the mural was complete a woman employee that worked upstairs across the street from Taylor Hall called the administration and seriously complained and asked when they were going to fix the wall.

2. It was also reported by the C.S.U.C. public affairs officer Bob Pentzer that after the completion of the Taylor Hall project several rear-end accidents were reported occuring at the stop sign adjacent to the mural because motorists were distracted while viewing the broken wall illusion.

And this is the one:

Next accident was reported on march 1994 in New York Art Expo.

Witnesses working at a show of John Pugh's paintings reported three separate occassions where art patrons inadvertently broke wine glasses and spilled wine or beer as a result of trying to set their glass or mug on an illusionary shelf of a painted secret garden niche.

This was the critical spot on Pugh's mural in NY
people used to accidentally drop their glasses because they thought it was real

Let's get back to our first wall mural - Cafe Trompe L'oeil San Jose:

February 1997 San Jose, California

A complaint was lodged to a manager at Cafe Trompe L'oeil by a male restaurant patron that he had ineffectively attempted to introduce himself to female patron and had received the "silent treatment". He was unaware that woman he was talking to was a painted illusion.