For this assignment, we were asked to take a concept or theory and explain how it applied to an experience in our life. The experience that stands out most to me occurred when I was a senior in high school. During my senior year, I had the privilege of attending an art history class that looked at numerous paintings, drawings, pictures, and sculptures by various artists; however, there was one artist’s work that really caught my eye. The artist was none other than Maurits Cornelis (M.C.) Escher. Escher constructed many drawings that were not only abstract in nature but perceptively complex. Escher had a keen understanding of how the human eye perceived space and as a result was able to expand this knowledge into his drawings in which objects were perceived as three dimensional.
This ability of inferring three dimensional objects from a two dimensional drawing, is mainly due to the concept of monocular depth cues. In class, we learned that monocular cues allow us to perceive depth which creates the representation of three dimensional (3-D) space (Wolfe, 2012). There are several monocular depth cues that allow this perception of 3-D to occur: occlusion (infers relative position in depth: front of/behind), relative size (comparison of size of objects without knowing their absolute size), relative height (comparison that objects at different distances on the ground plane will form different heights: objects lower in the plane will seem closer), texture gradient (a combination of relative size and height that the texture (geometric shapes) of an object gets smaller when farther away), familiar size (based on knowledge of an objects size), aerial perspective (distant objects appear fainter, bluer and less recognizable), and linear perspective (parallel lines converge to a vanishing point) (Wolfe, 2012).
To better illustrate the correlation of monocular depth cues to Escher’s artwork, we will look at his famous drawing (Hand with a Reflecting Sphere: Figure 1). In the drawing, we can see that Escher uses linear perspective to reflect depth when drawing the walls. As you can see, the walls get closer (converge) as they move towards the window at the back which causes are visual system to perceive that this depth signifies farthest away. Additionally, relative height is being applied to the drawing (compare the size of the stools at the front and back of the room: they get smaller farther back), relative size (the books get smaller as they move away/towards the window), texture gradient (the texture/geometric shape of the pictures becomes smaller and less recognizable), and occlusion (the depiction of the hand with the fingers around the sphere give depth; fingers and hand positioned before/front of the sphere).
The summation of these cues causes are visual system to take the various depth perspectives and construct a three dimensional representation of space within the art work. Therefore, the keen understanding of how our visual system works has proved to be instrumental to Escher’s success. Without this understanding of how are monocular depth cues constructs our perspective; the inference of three dimensional objects would not be possible.
References
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/66/Hand_with_Reflecting_Sphere.jpg
Wolfe, J. M. (2012). Sensation & perception (3rd ed.). Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer
Associates.
Figure 1: Hand_with_Reflecting_Sphere_Escher
