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Christian Thee, Artist Of Illusion
________________________________________________
Christian Thee, Artist Of Illusion
By John Tudor, from MAGIC magazine, Edited by John Moerhring
(See also the Christian Thee website)
From magic tricks as a boy magician, to apprentice to scenic design masters on Broadway, to contriving secret rooms for architects, to worldwide recognition for his work…Walter Christian Thee has been surprising people his entire life. “There are many ways to fool the eye,” he observes, “Art is a lie that makes you aware of the truth.”
Thee is a master of the Trompe L’oeil style, that literally means, “to deceive the eye.” Trompe l’oeil (pronounced “tromp -loy”) fools the viewer with minute details and skillful use of perspective, light, color, shadow, and other elements to create a perfect illusion.
The level of artistry and intricate detail of Chris Thee’s paintings is just part of the picture; his use of magic and theater techniques enhances the total effect of his paintings, and the purity of the illusions is startling. The effect is so complete that the line between illusionary space and real space seems to disappear. Theatrical illusionist Jeff McBride says, ”To encounter the enviro-magical wonder workings of Mr. Thee, is to enter into a multidimensional feast…an eye-gasmic experience!”
Thee’s art is not of a kind that is created to just hang in a gallery, even though he’s had five one man shows and been in many exhibits. So much as to be “lived with.” That is one reason he creates so many murals for private homes and estates, restaurants and hotels, and offices.
Chris spent six weeks in comedian Joan Rivers’ luxurious New York apartment, creating a French chateau theme trompe l’oeil foyer and ceiling. The Persian mural Chris painted for Donald Trump at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City was 46-feet long and 9-feet tall, with $8,000 worth of gold leaf used for the skyscape alone. He was commissioned to paint Prince Andrew’s portrait for his 21st birthday, and was invited by Queen Elizabeth to attend the birthday party at Windsor Castle. “This is the greatest privilege,” Chris says, “making a living doing what I love.”
When Chris turned four, his mother, also an artist, took Chris to his first play. It was at historical Town Theatre in his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina. It was not long after this experience that the young Thee began to draw stage sets. By age seven, he had made his stage debut, as one of the sons in Life With Father.
The same year, he was twice touched by magic: “I had an uncle who was a very good magician”, Chris recalls. “He showed me his Color Changing Knives, then gave me the knives.” He also got to see the stage show of Harry Blackstone, Sr., and remembers being particularly impressed with the illusion, Where Do the Ducks Go?
His early talent bloomed both onstage and at the drawing board, and he often combined the two worlds of magic and art. For instance, he created a “golden touch” for his portrayal of King Midas who,: with counterweights and black cloth at his fingers, caused clay pots to be transformed into gold. Athough he continued to pursue acting and magic (his professional shows now included a two person mental act), Chris’ interests had shifted from performing to designing.
By the time he arrived in New York to study at Columbia University, Thee had already designed several shows. Upon graduation, Thee joined the faculty of the School of Stage Design, where he worked with two masters: Lester Poliakoff and the acclaimed Joe Mielzener, who designed the sets for Streetcar Named Desire, The King and I, Carousel, South Pacific, and dozens of other Broadway shows. The first Broadway show to have Thee’s name listed in the credits was Hair. Since then, he’s designed many shows on-and-off Broadway and regional theater. Thee’s magical know-how came through not just in set designs, but in carefully created effects – such as the flowers that would slowly and naturally wilt upon the appearance of Dracula, or the singing decapitated head in The Robber Bridegroom.
The theater’s unpredictability eventually took its toll, and Thee made the transition from a successful scenic designer to an accomplished muralist by making use of one of his hobbies, magic and illusion. He became a master of the trompe l’oeil style by integrating his magical and theatrical knowledge, always maintaining his sense of playfulness.
Chris delights in visual jokes; for instance, in museums and exhibits he likes to airbrush shadows onto the platform the work is mounted upon. “I don’t think fun is a bad word,” says Thee. “People who enjoy my work are usually people with a sense of humor.”
In one home he painted an Oriental rug that was so realistic that ladies in heels would spend entire evenings trying to avoid stepping on the fringe. In another home, he painted a broken strand of pearls on the entryway floor that had first-time guests dropping to their knees, trying to salvage the jewels before they rolled away.
“I’ve never done anything twice,” he says. “The funny thing about writing or being a painter is that you never really learn it all. It’s an ongoing learning process.” The Columbia Museum of Art’s Orientation Room is a total immersion trompe l’oeil room: the painting of a gated secret garden covers all four walls, and once inside with the door shut the exit is hidden.
It was not long before Thee had produced his first children’s book, Behind The Curtain. It is a multi-dimensional look across the footlights at what happens backstage during a performance. The reader sees what the audience rarely sees: stage hands working, the orchestra tuning up, costumers and makeup artists preparing.
Longtime friend Rhett Bryson says of Chris, ”He never stops looking, caring, worrying over how to be the absolute best he can be…how many magical artists are like that?”
Chris also creates games and environmental effects, including secrets doors and hidden passages; all of which combine the skills of the craft and the intrigue of decorative illusion. He believes “A person’s home is like a stage setting where people play out the joys and sorrows of their lives.” He likens entering the front door to the curtain going up as a stage play begins.
Novel Deception: A completely realistic stack of books turns out to be a wooden table with hidden drawers that perform a card trick. A tarot card is freely selected, and the spectator places the cards face down in the drawer, then closes it. After miss-guessing the card, the drawer is opened to reveal the correct chosen card now face up. The spectator is told to pick up the cards, only to find that it’s a beautifully painted illusion…or is it?
He created his first “magic home” while living in New York, in a huge windowless Brooklyn Heights warehouse. The interior was transformed into an eccentric country house, with trompe l’oeil windows looking onto surreal vistas, an exotic garden complete with babbling brook, and seven secret doors disguised as bookcases or windows.
The walls of the dining room/studio featured painted drapery and a tented ceiling with a crystal chandelier at it’s center, all of which could be struck like a stage set. Picture if you will, the prospective client who dined in this elegant room, went to the living room for coffee, and, when brought back…discovered the dining room had vanished! After a story in New York Magazine, it became such a popular place that Thee began renting it out for parties and weddings. Such theatrical luminaries as composer Stephen Sondheim and director Hal Prince dined there.
Chris eventually returned to South Carolina. The house in Columbia that he shares with his longtime partner Bruce Bahr (who once designed costumes for the Joseph Papp Public Theater) is a sprawling a tribute to illusion. As one walks through the home, many things that seem real (the grandfather clock with moving works, for instance) which turn out to be painted on a wall. In the living room are miniature models of working stages – all fully functional, displaying different play’s set changes and lighting designs.
There are five secret doors that have no knobs, just touch a decorative object and the doors mysteriously swing open. Press a button hidden in a book, and a color television set rises from a chest of drawers. Try to straighten out the tabletop lace doily, only to find the doily is painted on. Illusion is everywhere. And it’s not safe to believe your eyes, or your ears. You actually hear finches faintly chirping in the painted birdcages.
Dividing the rest of the house from the studio is a close up magic theater. It is a performance space and as well as a museum decorated with original Golden Age posters. The names of magic’s greats are cleverly inscribed on the walls. A variety of one-of-a-kind magic tricks are built into the theater. ”Magic to me is really a part of the theater and, to me, good Theater is Magic.” Chris performs a Magic Castle type séance, complete with sound and lighting effects, for his houseguests.
The Trompe l’oeil style dates back to Roman times. Two thousand years ago, Pliny the Elder wrote of a Greek painter named Zeuxis, an artist who created a painting of grapes so lifelike that birds flew down to peck at them. Trompe l’oeil was not just created or devised not just to challenge the sense of reality, but also to display the skill of the artist. The style has always been used as a technique exercise in art schools. The art form is now more popular than ever. The sophisticated eye is still entranced by the playful manipulation of our sense of what is and isn’t real.
It’s easy to see the similarity to magic in the visual processes at work in trompe l’oeil painting. The genre uses many of the same techniques magicians use to create fake tabletops or bevel bases for illusions. The trompe l’oeil artist also uses misdirection to control attention and manipulation viewpoint. The eyes are told where to look and the mind is told what to perceive, challenging the sense of what really is a flat surface.
The psychological parallels of trompe l’oeil to magic is what takes place in the mind. The best murals go beyond visual perception and unfold their secrets slowly. Chris sees this as a dialogue with the viewer. First, he leads the viewer into acceptance of the reality, convincing that “the grapes must be real”. Then, as a sense of the deception grows, the viewer is compelled to take a closer look, and often exclaims in surprise, “The grapes can’t be real!” Next, the inner eye usually goes from surprise to confusion, followed by readjustment to reality – “The grapes are not real after all”, a final delight at the skill of the artist. “I enjoy doing work that allows people to uncover surprises”, Chris says.
“I’m in the house all the time, and I’m still always finding something new!” exclaims close friend Michael Roh.
A month after the convention, Mr. Thee was called to make a special appearance on The Jackie Gleason Show. He was flown to Miami for the live CBS broadcast. The character of Reggie Van Gleason, assisting as a drunken lout from the audience, literally executed the On Target effect. Chris remembers, ”I felt like I was hanging on for dear life.”
At the IBM/SAM Combined Convention in New York City in 1964, Chris was awarded the IBM Originality Contest Trophy for his effect, which was now called “Magic Circa 1890.” The November 1964 issue of the Linking Ring published Thee’s working drawings (he was a member of Scenic Artists and Designers local 8290), with the statement, The effect is copyrighted by the International Brotherhood of Magicians.”
Not long after the award, Thee accepted an offer from Connecticut dealer George Cook to manufacture and sell his trick. The agreement was that Cook would construct the table, which soon became known as the “Cook Table.” He agreed to send invoices to Thee whenever one was sold. Chris made drawings for the US Patent Office for his own protection. But to his recollection, Chris never received anything for sales of the Cook Table, and eventually just forgot about it.
On Target was never was a big selling item. At $150, the trick was expensive for its day. The electrical circuitry was of questionable reliability and the trick had a reputation of shorting-out power circuits. The triggering mechanism was a rotating arm that switched on motors to pull nylon threads to make the magic happen.
Two decades later, Rich Bloch was going through a collection of apparatus he’d acquired from the estate of the late Ed Mishell, and found a Cook’s Table. “I set it up to show my wife,” Rich recalls, ”and it shorted out the power in my whole house.” Rich’s wife, Sue, declared it “the most impressive trick I’ve ever seen Rich do.”
Bloch set out to update the mechanism, upgrade the electrical circuitry, and improve the routine. He added a sound-activated computer chip that was triggered by a blank gun. Renaming it Jumbo Sidekick, he added the bits of the tabletop falling over to reveal the (wrong) card, then shooting the extra pip off the card to reveal the right selection. Manufactured through Collector’s Workshop, the effect found it’s way into many professional acts and shows, including the repertoire of David Copperfield.
Well over a thousand Jumbo Sidekicks have been sold. “It was one of three or four items that were staple of Collectors Workshop,” says Bloch. “Yet I was surprised to find that Chris wasn’t really that interested in what had become of his creation. He’d just gone on to so many other things.” Christian Thee eventually got full recognition for his creation a few years ago when another builder started selling the trick, and mentioned him in their ads. Chris said he was disappointed in the quality of this “new” version.
Thee himself is a bundle of energy, an ebullient man who loves to perform, to entertain folks with lots of parties at his house, and to tell a good joke. Gay Blackstone says of Chris ”He’s warm, gracious, and so much fun…he’s everything to entertaining that magic is to the eye.” In 1997, when the Blackstone show played Columbia, South Carolina, Chris threw a birthday party for Gay Blackstone, inviting their cast and crew and many of the local magicians. ”Chris opened his fantastic playhouse to us, and made what was otherwise a sad occasion (it turned out to be Harry Jr.’s last performance) into a once-in-a-lifetime, uplifting experience.”
Christian Thee’s absolute skill as an artist and broad sensitivity makes his work powerful. he continues to create illusions of space and place that confound the imagination. He has a way of perceiving the world that challenges the perceptions, thereby, forever creating a deep sense of wonder.
“My work at my life are inseparable”, he reminds, “and I’ve never stopped believing in magic!”
© 2009 John Tudor