The famous faces/vase illusion shown to the left demonstrates confusion between objects and background, or figure and ground. We can see it either as faces or as vase, but not as both at once - either the faces or the vase seem to "pop-out". In everyday vision we are not usually confronted by puzzles like this, because the edges of adjacent, irregular shaped objects only very rarely come together without leaving any gaps, as the face and vase edges do here. They fit together like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle. (The octopuses and cats in the wallpaper in comic book picture 18 also fit together like this).
The adjacent figures in Mauritz Escher's famous tessellating patterns also flip between being figure and ground, see his designs at www.mcescher.com (click on gallery and then on symmetry) or in Doris Schattschneider: M.C.Escher, Visions of Symmetry, (Thames and Hudson, London, 2004), which also explains how he achieved the interlocking patterns - see the commentary to comic book picture 17.
Pablo Picasso delighted in a variation on the figure/ground flip. The effect is demonstrated in the face shown to the lower left. The right hand side of it appears as a face in profile, so that we can take it as figure and the rest of the face as ground, but the whole figure can also be taken as a face seen from the front. Picasso often used this effect to suggest different aspects of a single personality. There's a beautiful example in his Girl Before a Mirror, of 1932, now in MOMA in New York. You can see that on the web at www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78311 The face in comic book picture 1 is a variant on this effect too.
Comic book picture 25, Art Therapy, shows this kind of pop-out as a procedure aimed (unsuccessfully) at releasing the characters from the graphic world in which they have become trapped. The framed painting the characters get involved in as part of the treatment seems to be a collaboration between Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. They never worked together in real life. The bit of the picture in the style of Picasso, showing Fran somewhat distorted, is (questionably) reminiscent of his Acrobate Bleu, of 1929. That's in the French National Collection of Modern Art in the Beaubourg - the Centre Pompidou - in Paris. I find their web-site a bit slow and clunky, but the picture is also on many sites offering reproductions for sale. Just put "Picasso Acrobate Bleu" into Google Images. In the rest of the picture, in the style of Chagall, the sketchy moon, flowers and goat are more like the painting he was doing by the nineteen fifties. Prints of his late paintings are on dozens of web-sites too.
& Comic Book Picture 25, Art Therapy View Comic-Book Picture
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The famous faces/vase illusion shown to the left demonstrates confusion between objects and background, or figure and ground. We can see it either as faces or as vase, but not as both at once - either the faces or the vase seem to "pop-out". In everyday vision we are not usually confronted by puzzles like this, because the edges of adjacent, irregular shaped objects only very rarely come together without leaving any gaps, as the face and vase edges do here. They fit together like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle. (The octopuses and cats in the wallpaper in comic book picture 18 also fit together like this).
The adjacent figures in Mauritz Escher's famous tessellating patterns also flip between being figure and ground, see his designs at www.mcescher.com (click on gallery and then on symmetry) or in Doris Schattschneider: M.C.Escher, Visions of Symmetry, (Thames and Hudson, London, 2004), which also explains how he achieved the interlocking patterns - see the commentary to comic book picture 17.
Pablo Picasso delighted in a variation on the figure/ground flip. The effect is demonstrated in the face shown to the lower left. The right hand side of it appears as a face in profile, so that we can take it as figure and the rest of the face as ground, but the whole figure can also be taken as a face seen from the front. Picasso often used this effect to suggest different aspects of a single personality. There's a beautiful example in his Girl Before a Mirror, of 1932, now in MOMA in New York. You can see that on the web at www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78311 The face in comic book picture 1 is a variant on this effect too.
Comic book picture 25, Art Therapy, shows this kind of pop-out as a procedure aimed (unsuccessfully) at releasing the characters from the graphic world in which they have become trapped. The framed painting the characters get involved in as part of the treatment seems to be a collaboration between Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. They never worked together in real life. The bit of the picture in the style of Picasso, showing Fran somewhat distorted, is (questionably) reminiscent of his Acrobate Bleu, of 1929. That's in the French National Collection of Modern Art in the Beaubourg - the Centre Pompidou - in Paris. I find their web-site a bit slow and clunky, but the picture is also on many sites offering reproductions for sale. Just put "Picasso Acrobate Bleu" into Google Images. In the rest of the picture, in the style of Chagall, the sketchy moon, flowers and goat are more like the painting he was doing by the nineteen fifties. Prints of his late paintings are on dozens of web-sites too.
You will find figure/ground effects are great for enlivening your own artwork. The spatial effects shown in comic book picture 10 and comic book picture 12 and described in the commentaries are also special effects of this kind. See the entry on the subject on my other site at www.opticalillusion.net/optical-illusions/figureground-artistic-effects/