Hypnotic Art
The Mona Lisa - Leonardo Da Vinci, 1503
The Mona Lisa was painted by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is thought to be the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about work of art in the world! It is displayed at The Louvre museum in Paris. The Mona Lisa is famed for having eyes that follow the viewer around a room. The landscape behind her is higher on one side than the other. This tricks the viewer into thinking that her eyes are moving. Nobody knows exactly who the woman in the painting is, although it is though to be a lady called Lisa Gherardini.
Earth - Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1570
Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books. His painting are interesting because your eyes perceive the whole image and then flip back to seeing the animals that make up the whole painting.
All is Vanity - Charles Allan Gilbert, 1892
Charles Allan Gilbert was an American illustrator. The drawing All Is Vanity uses a double image in which the scene of a woman admiring herself in a mirror, when viewed from a distance, appears to be a human skull. The title is also a pun, as this type of dressing-table is also known as a vanity.
Swans Reflecting Elephants - Salvador Dali, 1937
Swans Reflecting Elephants is a painting by the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. Painted using oil paint on canvas, it contains one of his famous double images. He used this method to create hallucinatory forms, double images and visual illusions that filled his paintings. Swans Reflecting Elephants uses the reflection in a lake to create the double image seen in the painting.
Day and Night - M.C. Escher, 1938
Maurits Cornelis Escher was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his mathematically inspired woodcuts and lithograph prints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations (repeated shapes that fit into each other exactly).
Tinker and Housewife - Rex Whistler, 1946
Rex Whistler was a British artist, illustrator and a set and costume designer for the West End theatres in London. He had a career that covered many creative pursuits. Tinker and Housewife was one of many illustrations he did of reversible heads. The illustrations were first published in a book called OHO in 1946, after his death. These illustrations played with optical illusion – if you viewed the illustration one way it would be a tinker and if you turned it upside-down you would see a housewife. Others in the series included a policeman that turns into a sailor, and a queen that turns into a king.
Intake - Bridget Riley, 1964
Bridget Riley is an English painter who is known for her optical art. Her works are abstract and often black and white. When the viewer looks at them, the impression is given of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or alternatively, of swelling or warping.
Metamorphose I - Markus Raetz, 1990
Explosion in Paris - Julian Beever, 2001
The Orb - Neil Dawson, 1991
Horizons - Neil Dawson, 1994
Miss Understood & Mr Meanor - Tim Webster and Sue Noble, 1997
Tim Webster and Sue Noble are two British artists who worked as a collaborative duo. Miss Understood & Mr Meanor was the first shadow illusion work they made for discarded household waste. The objects and lighting is positioned in such a way, that the shadow cast creates a sharp impression of two heads in the gallery space. The Individual is a more current work made from a wooden stepladder, discarded wood and a light projector.
Surrounding at Ten - Felice Varini, 1999
Felice Varini is a Swiss artist that paints geometric patterns on urban spaces such as buildings, streets and walls. There is always one vantage point from which the viewer can see the complete painting, while from other viewpoints the geometric shapes are broken and fragmented. He uses a projector to map out designs and create the illusions of suspended shapes.
Rotating Snakes - Akiyoshi Kitaoka, 2003
Akiyoshi Kitaoka is a professor of psychology in Kyoto, Japan. He specialises in visual perception and visual illusions of geometrical shape, brightness, colour, in motion illusions and other visual phenomena. He is renouned for designing the peripheral drift illusion Rotating Snakes.
Cloud Gate - Anish Kapoor, 2006
Cloud Gate is a public sculpture by Indian-born, British artist Anish Kapoor. The sculpture is in the AT&T Plaza at Millennium Park in the Loop community area of Chicago, Illinois. It is made up of 168 stainless steel plates welded together. The seems are highly polished so it has no visible seams. It measures 10x20x13 meters and weighs 110 tons.
Hiding in the City - Liu Bolin, 2008
Chinese artist Liu Bolin, has often be referred to as ‘The Invisible Man’. He paints his entire body to match the surrounding environment. When he is photographed it can be near-impossible to spot him. The backgrounds range from shop interiors, to decorative walls, ships in a port and tanks!
The Eye of History - Marc Quinn, 2012
Marc Quinn is a British artist. We also used the irises in the opening of the movie, where they look like planets in space. He took pictures of people's eyes, manipulated the irises in a computer and then had them painted in oil on large canvasses. Some of the pictures are two metres high. They are beautiful and mesmerising.
Full title: The Eye of History (Atlantic Perspective) Raw Earth
