Training to look at Art in a new way . . .

Sheena Crawley '13, who will start grad school at Maryland Institute College of Art in September, discovered these cool paintings and sent them my way.

Not only do the stairs look better;
did you see how the red trapezoid turns into a red square?

 Sheena says,

I chose this particular piece because I was planning a trip to New York and was curious if I would see any anamorphic art like this in my travels through the New York subways. Unfortunately, I did not run across any anamorphic artwork. It would have been nice to experience artwork like this in person though.

These cool images (and others like them) are part of an exhibit in the Toronto Subway system:  From Here Right Now, an installation by the artist Panya Clark Espinal.

The artist herself writes

This series of images is intended to accentuate our consciousness about movement and travel through everyday spaces, particularly through these places of transition, while allowing for playful interaction.

Sheena's comment about wanting to see this herself reminds me of an email message I got from a mathematical colleague who tried making anamorphic art with his class.  He wrote

We are finishing up the semester doing anamorphic chalk art a la Julian Beever, using your book [Viewpoints]  as guidance . . .  BUT, yesterday in class we did the smiley face.  It didn’t look right!  I was getting kicked out of the room by the next class and so I took pictures to figure out what was wrong.  It looked correct in the picture!!  But not when I moved my eye to the EXACT SAME LOCATION!
                I redid it today myself.  SAME THING.  When you look at it with your eye it doesn’t seem correct.  But it does with the camera.  (See attached.)
                Here’s my guess that I wanted to check with you:

A mathematician is happy because . . .

Conjecture:  The photographic image looks more correct because when viewing the drawing in real life your eyes are catching all of the visual clues about perspective (chalkboard edges, grid lines drawn in, floor and ceiling receding from you) and subconsciously your mind is compensating for these things (like doing a Necker cube shift).

So it's possible that if Sheena had seen the art live, she would have been disappointed.  What could have helped?  I wrote back to my colleague, saying he ought to find a way to block out external clues.  And that was exactly the trick he needed.  He wrote:

WOW!!  It is just AMAZING!!
I have a smiley face outside of my office and students have a YinYang in our classroom.  Both look like junk when you look with one eye open, worse with two eyes open.  When you put a tube in front of your eye they are PERFECT!!  In fact, I cut tubes to have the correct "focal length" so the image field frames the bounding circle exactly.  I cannot tell you how stunning it is.

So there you have it.  If you're in the subway and see some ho-hum anamorphic art, grab a toilet paper tube!