Richard Wright and Anamorphic Projections

Some artists arrive like a slow burn. Richard Wright is one of them. I first saw his work in Edinburgh in an old Georgian house. He had created a mural that changed the space as you walked through the rooms, the drawings also echoed the architectural decoration.  A few years later he won the Turner prize. Wright uses perspective techniques to create optical illusions, anamorphic projections, such as those used in the Renaissance. His abstract patterns can create vertiginous spatial illusions. You can read a review of his work here. 

Images above Richard Wright

Anamorphic projections are much easier to create than you think, all you need is access to a plumb-line, a good sense of geometry and a way of establishing your audience’s viewing point.

Jim Bond’s Anamorphic Man is a three dimensional anamorphic projection. When viewed through the circle on the left the figure becomes whole. 

Jim Bond 2006

Working this way using wire or other 3D materials to draw can create surprisingly ‘eccentric’ images. Because you are only trying to control how everything looks from one viewpoint, the rest of the image simply ‘arrives’ as part of the process and therefore comes into being without you having to think about what it might look like. As you walk around the image when it is finished it will often have many surprising new compositions. The work of Georges Rousse and Felice Varini are typical examples of using anamorphic projections over architectural spaces. See this blog post for more details. However the most influential figure in the history of anamorphic projections is Jean François Niceron (1613-1646), catholic friar, mathematician, and artist. His most famous work was 'La Perspective Curieuse' (The Curious Perspective) first published in 1638. It deals with the practical application of perspective alongside what he calls catoptrics and dioptrics.  The book is well work looking at as the perspective drawings are wonderful images in their own right, but it also works as a practical guide on how to make anamorphic illusions.

From Niceron's The Curious Perspective

Lots of street artists use these techniques and they have become a sort of ‘street art’ sensation because we now have cameras that can be placed at the viewers eye point to make everything look ‘fantastic’. My own view is that the final ‘right’ perspective is often the most boring viewpoint, the exciting images are the ones that occur simply as a result of the process. The fragmented images that litter the room below are much more demanding as an image than the ‘normal’ face image we see if we are at the right viewpoint.

Similarly with street illusions. Great fun that they are, once you get it and take the photo, that's it, an illusionist's trick. The more interesting art is perhaps in what else is going on. 

Street drawing illusion using anamorphic projection

Probably the most famous anamorphic projection in art history is the skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors.  Designed to hang in a stairway, a viewer would approach the painting initially as they walked down the stairs, the only thing that would appear to be in the right perspective would be the skull, however when they got to the landing and looked at the full painting, the skull would virtually disappear, now being a distorted, formless shape. 

The full painting.

What you see of the skull from the front.

What you would see from the stairs.

It’s an old trick, but it works well, artists such as Richard Wright returning to these conventions because of a rise in interest in drawing as an extension of architecture, the expanded field of drawing now expanding mentally backwards into time and reinvigorating old skills and practices, as well as expanding physically onto walls and over buildings. 

See also:

Illusion part 1
Illusion part 2