HE’S NO FANTASY John Gaughan with the Turk, a chess-playing automaton with a legendary background. Natasha Calzatti for The New York Times

Los Angeles

CHANCES are you’ve never heard of John Gaughan.

He doesn’t advertise. He doesn’t have a Web site. There is no street entrance to his workshop, a former 1930s aircraft school alongside railroad tracks on a dry, industrial stretch of road that straddles the city limits of Los Angeles and Glendale. Visitors must drive around back, past stacks of steel beams and cans of spray paint, toward a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

That Mr. Gaughan, 68, is not easily found befits an artisan who has spent most of his life creating large-scale illusions for many of the world’s most famous magicians and illusionists: Siegfried & Roy, David Blaine, Criss Angel, David Copperfield, Doug Henning, Mark Wilson, Ricky Jay.