Illusion

There are two closely related but quite different approaches to the idea of illusion within the drawing canon. One is closely related to what we usually call optical illusions and the other is more to do with giving an illusion of reality or as it is often called trompe-l'œil or deceiving the eye. At times they may merge together and at other times they are clearly separate ideas. Both rely on an understanding of optics and therefore the history of working with illusions is often inseparable from the optical devices or optical theories that were used in order to be able to plot out possible illusionistic concepts and ideas.

The classic text in relation to these issues is Gombrich's 'Art and Illusion'; he sets out to explain why there was a constantly changing series of styles throughout art history and concentrated on how artists attempted to develop work that was rooted in an imitation of nature and how as they did this their working methods became embedded into the traditions of art practice. In this way he could explain how on the one hand artists were always referring to other art and on the other hand how artists could break with tradition and build upon it by developing new techniques in order to be able to more accurately reflect what they saw in nature.

This interrellationship between on the one hand the various traditions of art and on the other changing theories of visual perception has meant that various artists from many different periods in Western art history have found this a rich field to explore.

Optical illusions are quite common in mosaics from various regions of the Roman Empire.



The shapes circled in the image above can be seen as 3-D cubes that optically flip from the inside to the outside, an effect known as ambiguous or bistable perception. This is technically known as the Necker cube illusion, whereby cubes appear to simultaneously protrude and intrude.  

Necker cubes

Escher was of course very aware of this and used the duality of reading this type of construction has to create a series of complex visual conundrums. 

Escher

Escher

Escher is fascinated by optical illusions and realised that all you have to do is to provide secondary visual information that appears to stabilise the reading, such as placing figures in what appear to be convincing spaces, to make a spatial paradox. The optical flip is now compromised as his more three dimensionally solid figures 'inhabit' spaces that on second glance are physically impossible. Probably the most powerful of these optical illusions is the Penrose triangle.

Penrose Triangle

Escher used the Penrose triangle several times, most famously in his image 'The Waterfall'.

Escher: The Waterfall

You can get an idea of what he was doing by looking at the image above of two Penrose triangles superimposed on the original image. However it's also important to remember that he is also using the construction of a Necker cube, if he had tried using perspective to construct the image he would never have been able to achieve the optical flip. 

It was the 'optical flip', this propensity for an image to hover between two states that interested more abstract artists. What many artists were looking for was a way to give an image 'life'. By using this type of construction an observer was always having to work hard to see and in doing so was bringing into one 'gestalt' more than one experience. Picasso had already introduced one aspect of this as part of Cubism.

Braque

Like Picasso, Braque was very aware that you could put together two or more views of the same thing and if you got the balance right your viewer would have to be active in their perception of it.  The painting of a woman by Braque above, is a classical example of this, a realisation that was at the core of the Cubist idea. 

Like many artists I have used the idea myself as a way to keep an image alive. 

Plantar fasciitis

Hans Hoffman was deeply influenced by Cubism and introduced the term 'push-pull' into the language of drawing and painting during the middle of the 20th century. He was a very influential American art educator, carrying European ideas about painting across the Atlantic and at the core of his teaching was the effort to find a living visual form. This life had much to do with the Cubist legacy and relied on the way your eye seeks out form on a flat surface. By opening out the forms in a drawing, (and this was often the result of erasure) the eye was left finding a balance between structural elements of formal construction and the rhythmic elements of visual dynamism. Therefore a line that operated both as a vertical or horizontal and as a spatial indicator was to be valued. These drawings below were done in his classes and you can see how he was attempting to develop spatial junctures in order to enliven the surface. Sometimes going as far as cutting the drawing up so that when put back together new spaces and structures were formed. However at the end of the day, what he is seeking is a construction that allows the eye to flip back and forth in a similar way to how a Necker cube works. 

All the drawings above were done in classes held by Hoffman and they remind me of the type of life drawing often seen in art college when I was a student; this area of abstraction was key to how a life session might be taught when I first entered teaching. It might appear as if I've by now wondered far away from a debate about illusion but the issue of optical illusion that began this post was the illusion of something being capable of being at one moment one thing and in another moment something else. The drawing above in one reading creates a body and in another creates a space. Interestingly the hands are more illusionistic, i.e. are closer to what we might call an illusion of reality and these two hands don't allow for the 'flip' between one reading and another.  

When making a drawings from marks and lines there is almost a 'resistance' to pictorial illusion, the viewer has to do a lot more work in order to grasp the relationship with the 'real' world. For instance there is no colour, a series of lines can be made to stand for a hand. Lines and marks are clues for the mind to unpick and therefore there is always a certain level of ambiguity as to the way you might understand what they represent. In this very ambiguity lies the effectiveness of the Necker cube illusion and the use to artists like Hoffman in their struggle to find 'life' within an image. You could say that the 'life' they found was therefore a type of pulse, a pulse of flicker backwards and forwards, in and out of the space, at one moment one thing and then another. This was the visual heartbeat of the drawing and if it wasn't there the drawing would effectively be dead. 

One optical illusion that illustrates this point is the ability of a drawing to be read as one recognisable entity and then another, the classic version of this being the duck rabbit illusion. 





There are several of these types of dual read images such as the young/old lady version above and several artists have made use of them in their work.

However one of the most subtle and effective two way illusions is from nearly a thousand years ago. The Airavatesvara Hindu Temple is located in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu and it is covered in the most wonderful carvings and amongst them is a fantastic optical illusion of a cow/elephant. 

Cow/elephant: Airavatesvara Temple

The placing of this image within the confines of a temple devoted to religious worship reinforced for myself the idea that all things are an illusion. The flicking backwards and forwards of cow/elephant identities both giving life to the image and forever melding the two creatures together, suggesting the deep interrelationship that all things have in this world. 

Jasper Johns has long being fascinated by these illusions and has used them over and over again in his work.

Jasper Johns

Johns has used the Rubin vase illusion several times, sometimes using his own profile and at others Duchamp's and occasionally using his own profile to make one side of the vase and Duchamp's the other. This idea was taken even further by the artists group 'FAT' their 2 vases entitled “Heroes of the Invisible” is made from the profiles of Mies van der Rohe and Marconi.

FAT Heroes of the Invisible

The fact that a new 'invisible' or concrete space is made from the gap between the two vases alluding to how we can think about space, van der Rohe as a visionary architect and Marconi as the inventor of the radio transmitter.
Another way to think about these issues is the figure/ground duality. At one moment an image can read as if it is an image that sits on a ground plane and at the same time it can be read the other way round. Put down a mark on a blank sheet of paper, and it is immediately read as a figure in space, the one defining the other. This is perhaps why so many artists have been fascinated by this area of illusion, it sits right at the centre of what happens when you begin to make a drawing. The observer always completes the circle of reception when you make any artwork and their interpretation is based on what they perceive. Because of this many theorists have spoken about 'the death of the author', in effect once you have made something, you have to let it go, and your audience will see in it things that you never intended. This can be liberating and you might because of your awareness of this, purposely leave elements of your work open to a duality of reading.
In order to see the 'Heroes of the Invisible' negative face you have to of course be in the right place and this brings me to another aspect of optical illusion, one that is focused on viewer position and spatial relationships, but this will have to be elaborated in a future post.

It depends on your point of view

If you want to read more about these issues a really good starting point is the catalogue of the Hayward gallery exhibition 'Eyes, Lies and Illusions: The Art of Deception'.


A much earlier post on colour illusion in relation to foundation course teaching can be found on my Art and Pedagogy blog

See also:

Illusion part 2
Richard Wright (Anamorphic projections)