An architect by day and a master of illusion in his off time, Ukranian Oleg Shuplyak, aka MrOlik, uses his technical skills as a trained architect to paint surreal optical illusions that contain portraits of other artists, authors and historical figures.
Oleg Shuplyak’s Hidden Figures Paintings
His Hidden Figures series includes work as early as 1992 through as recently as 2015. What at first appear to be classical paintings of figures in landscapes, they conceal a second image of a larger human face, easier to see when viewed from afar.
HIDDEN FIGURES / ARTISTS
Mind-blowing are his optical illusion homages to past Masters and Impressionists, which Shuplyak rendered in each artist’s particular style. He has taken paintings (in some case more than one) by well-known artists such as Van Gogh, Dali and Renoir – to name a few- and added his “Hidden Figures” while retaining the original artist’s manner of execution.
Leonardo da Vinci:
Bougereau:
Dali:
Cezanne:
Gauguin:
Ivan Aivazovsky:
Rembrandt:
Renoir:
Monet:
Michaelangelo:
Nicholas Roerich:
Van Gogh:
HIDDEN FIGURES / SCIENTISTS & INVENTORS
Other Hidden Figure paintings of Shuplyak’s reference the discoveries of historical inventors and scientists.
Darwin:
Newton:
Copernicus:
Gallileo:
Nostradamus:
Freud:
HIDDEN FIGURES / AUTHORS & POETS
His homages to novelists, playwrights and poets reference a particular work as well as the author.
Shakespeare:
Hemmingway: (Old Man and The Sea, Snows of Kilimanjaro)
Hans Christian Anderson (The Little Mermaid):
Tolstoy: (Anna Karenina)
Nikolai Gogol:
John Lennon: (Imagine)
Stakhnevich:
Kozbar (poetry of Taras Shevchenko):
Lesya Ukrainka: (Forest Song)
Theodore Sturgeon:
In addition to the above, there are these 10 more HIDDEN FIGURES paintings with whose subjects I am not familiar:
The artist’s works are located in collections at the National Museum of Taras Shevchenko in Kyiv, Ministry of Ukrainian Culture in Kyiv, International Foundation “Cultural Heritage” in Saint Petersburg, Russia and also in many private collections in several countries of the world.
His originals range from $3,000- $9,000 and can be purchased here.