Images: Stunning live 'canvas' artwork pictured

An American artist has caused quite a stir after her work was heralded for making live models look like still canvasses in an ingenious illusion.

Alexa Meade, 24, has perfected the art of making real subjects look like still life - by painting directly onto her models with a background behind. The final result leaves the subject appearing two-dimensional.

Meade’s work has been showcased at the Irvine Contemporary gallery in Washington DC, where the talented artist grew up. Formerly working as a press intern on the Obama campaign, Meade has had no formal painting education.

“Spending my formative years immersed in the world of politicians and PR led to a fascination with the possibilities of repackaging source texts and adding superficial modifications that would profoundly alter perception,” Meade states on her website.

“In my current work, I construct and then photograph ephemeral installation sets that feature an assemblage of found objects and live models, which I have covered in layers of acrylic paint,” she added.

“I paint the surfaces of the human subjects, the material objects, and the architecture of the installations so as to collapse the subject, foreground and background into one continuous plane”.