Joseph Somers

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Joseph Somers is an American artist and painter most famous for his canvases, three-dimensional in both their structure and illusion.

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[edit] Early Life

Somers lost both his parents at a young age and was raised with other homeless children on a farm in New York state. He joined the Army while quite young, just 16, and after returning to civilian life he spent the next 15 years with a religious vocation, and then worked in the medical field. [1]

[edit] Life as an Artist

Somers was interested in illusionist art and had been influenced by Escher and Dali. He opened his first studio in 1989. He drew on his extensive travels and varied career in his representational work. His canvases use a special technique to create the illusion of three dimensions. His furniture is often whimsical with painted surfaces, anthropomorphic legs, and plant-like growths.

[edit] Technique

His canvases are made of a series of vertically wedges, usually three per work, painted in a realistic style on each side of the wedge. The images are arranged so that, when seen from one point, the images on the various wedges form a realistic whole with only slight breaks in the visual field. These breaks are between the images of the different wedges. However, as the viewer moves in front of the canvas, the images on the various wedges seem to move and swim.

Photographs of his canvases give a sense of how they car constructed, but they give no real sense of the illusion of movement. The three wedges have six different surfaces, half facing left and the other half facing right. The most common method of composition is to have two separate images painted onto the canvas, one for the left-facing surfaces and another for the right-facing surfaces. Often one image shows a landscape. The other image is often a door, window or other opening. When viewed from a single point, it seems that there are three parallel openings looking onto a single scene. However, given that the images are painted not on a two-dimensional surface but instead on three-dimensional wedges, as one moves, the lines of perspective of this 3-D surface change in a way different from that of a 2-D surface, creating a pleasantly disorienting effect of a shifting, swimming surface.

[edit] References

  • Central Square Gallery [2]

[edit] External Links