CURVILINEAR PERSPECTIVE ARTISTS

Head-Turning Art

Curvilinear Artists capture the Wide-Angles of Human Vision

BY JOHN ROMAN

WE’VE ALL SEEN ‘FISH-EYE’ PHOTOS THAT WRAP A SCENE INTO A SPHERE, BUT FEW KNOW THAT THE ORIGINAL MODEL DATES BACK TO ANCIENT GREECE AROUND 500BC. JOHN ROMAN SCROLLS THROUGH THE HISTORY OF CURVILINEAR DRAWING.

Centuries before modern medical science understood the mechanics of eyesight, artists of the so-called ‘archaic’ period were using principles of optics in the visual art of their time.

According to historian Erwin Panofsky, Greek artists had a system for projecting designs onto flat surfaces that corresponds to the way information is received on a curved eye – the first ancient peoples to understand this. They were also aware it’s not possible for us to observe our full 180-degree range of sight without looking up, down, left, and right. They addressed this by adding a series of vertical (or lateral) vanishing points in paintings that were intended to turn the heads of viewers as they examined a work of art. This practice continued into the Roman era and beyond, before it was eventually abandoned for singlepoint perspectives during the Italian Renaissance of the 1400s. THE RENAISSANCE WINDOW Renaissance artists found plotting ‘straightened’ single-point images more suitable to their flat canvases and fresco walls, and this method has remained with us to the present day. The truth is we’ve all become so accustomed to paintings and drawings being perpendicular and straight-on that most 21st-century artists are not aware that traditional perspective drawings are, in fact, distortions of how we actually see the world.

Over the past several hundred years there have been attempts to reestablish the curvature of human sight to the arts. Artists such as Jan van Eyck, Manet and, closer to our time, M.C. Escher are examples. Though photography brought us fish-eye views in the 1900s, art that corrects or flattens what our eyes perceive continues as standard practice today.

THE WIDE-ANGLE WINDOW In the past decade or so, urban sketchers using a ‘curvilinear’ approach have been showing us what the world looks like through a convex lens, re-discovering what our historic art-ancestors first realized over 2,500 years ago: the 3-dimensional world around us is straight and level, but the arc of the human eye warps our impressions of it. Contemporary artists like Paul Heaston (USA), Gérard Michel (Belgium), and Lapin (Spain) are but a few of the international creators making us aware of our own ‘wide-angle windows’ in our perceptions of everyday life. By imagining a grid of five vanishing points, superimposed over whatever they depict, curvilinear artists project (or curve) all straight lines to those points. The result is a drawing that closely imitates the way our eyes perceive space.

A DETAIL FROM JAN VAN EYCK’S ARNOLFINI PORTRAIT SHOWS A CURVILINEAR SCENE AS REFLECTED IN A CONVEX MIRROR. (PUBLIC DOMAIN, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

By imagining a grid of five vanishing points, superimposed over whatever they depict, curvilinear artists project (or curve) all straight lines to those points. The result is a drawing that closely imitates the way our eyes perceive space.

RIGHT: TATTERED COVER BOOKSTORE BY PAUL HEASTON

CURVILINEAR SKETCHERS Paul Heaston is famous for curvilinear sketches of his personal environs and the places he frequents. No space is too small, too large, or too mundane for Heaston’s artistic eye. His intricate, freehand drawings put the viewer at ease, and the trademark inclusion of his hands and sketchbook in each drawing solidly establishes that we’ve been invited into Paul’s mind to share his unique, singular point of view.

ST MARK’S COFFEEHOUSE BY PAUL HEASTON

Lapin’s festive panoramic views convey a sense of fun as we accompany him on illustrated journeys to sites in and around his hometown of Barcelona. Lapin is an expert at capturing the distortion of vision in a way that subconsciously seems familiar to us, yet simultaneously entertains and fascinates. The spontaneous line and color treatments in his intricate

renditions seize the viewer and demand closer inspection. When studying a Lapin sketch, we cannot help but gaze from the left side of the scene to the right side, just as we would do if we were at the actual location. Lapin’s curvilinear work is the essence of what early Greek artists must have been attempting to capture.

FONTE DAS 3 BICAS BY LAPIN

LINCOLN CONTINENTAL BY LAPIN

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LIÈGE, PONT DE FRAGNÉE BY GÉRARD MICHEL

Gérard Michel is a master of technical, curvilinear art. Rendered freehand or methodically, every drawing by Michel, whether of a single object, room setting, or architectural view, is a superb creation of finely-tuned vision, showing enormous skill, refined composition, and exceptional craftsmanship. The sheer volume of urban sketching and curvilinear images Gérard has produced is astounding, a reflection of his love for the medium and his distinctive gift as a visual artist.

LIÈGE, ÉGLIES ST. JEAN BY GÉRARD MICHEL

A NEW ARTISTIC ERA In the history of art, it’s rare for a new technique or style to open minds to alternative ways of thinking about the world. In the 1800s, the Impressionist movement upset representational art’s long-held seat as the only acceptable approach to painting. Later, the Expressionists went beyond creating scenes and showed how an artist’s emotions could be infused into art. And the Cubists introduced multiple-point-of-view abstractions, changing everything, and fundamentally challenging realism.

Today we stand at the threshold of a new era in drawing and painting, one that has its roots in ancient times yet has taken over 2000 years to fully blossom. Artists like Heaston, Lapin and Michel are but a few of today’s visual explorers who are opening our eyes to how we really see what’s around us…and turning artists’ heads toward new ways of communicating their inspirations.

This story is an edited version of an article that was originally published in the July/August 2021 issue of Artists Magazine. Re-printed here with permission.

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