How to Pull "The Raven" Out of a Hat
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This method is not unprecedented, within my own oeuvre nor in art history. Since an exhibition in Venice in 1987, it has been called the Arcimboldo-effect after the sixteenth-century Milanese painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. What you see is "an image within an image" or a "picture of paranoia", a title suggested by Salvador Dalí, who had an important role in the rediscovery of Arcimboldo in the twentieth century. My early works applying this technique are actually references to Dalí, Albrecht Dürer, who also drew portraits hidden within landscapes, and M.C. Escher, who was not strictly speaking a designer of "ambiguous" pictures but reference to him is justified by his many experiments with geometrical complexes with multiple viewpoints. These works of mine are not real anamorphoses, because the angle of viewing does not have to be changed in order to make a new picture emerge; this is achieved by changing the distance from which the piece is viewed. From close up, details dominate (thus viewed, my etching Dürer in the Forest is simply a landscape) while from far-off, you get a more complex impression of the whole picture and a portrait of Albrecht Dürer emerges. Instead of moving a step further or closer you can narrow your eyes and the whole portrait prevails over the details. The situation becomes a bit more complicated if it is not the viewer but the picture that changes its 'point of view'. In my illustration Mysterious Island, there is a seashore with a sail pushed along by the wind. But if the image is turned upside down, a portrait of Jules Verne, my favourite childhood author, appears.
I created another illustration for Verne's novel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, a polar landscape with snow at sunset. If you place a mirror cylinder on the sun-disk when the picture is horizontal, it will reflect the face of the author. And this brings us to mirror anamorphoses. The best-known are those which use cylindrical mirrors, but cone- or pyramid-shaped mirrors are also possible. The first book on anamorphoses, La perspective curieuse, published in Paris in 1638, by the Franciscan friar Francois Niceron (a scientist and an artist) gives a detailed description of almost all the strategies of draughtsmanship. I also follow Niceron's descriptions; somehow it is reassuring to know that your technique is the same as Leonardo's, Holbein's, Dürer's and their followers.
I use Niceron's technique, even at a time when superb computer programs are available (like Kent's Anamorph Me!) and distortions can be designed more quickly and more easily. Some years ago I worried that with Photoshop Polar Coordinates anybody could produce in a few minutes something very similar to works I spent weeks on. But it is far from being the same. Even the best computer programs are only able to solve the problem of distortion. Technical background alone will never provide a distorted image with meaning or a message connected with the original meaning of the base picture. "Nothing but confusion" is a task for an artist. At least for the time being. and hopefully for the enduring future.
My etching Self-Portrait with Albert Einstein presents a true scientist, though both what you see on it and the title are meant to be misleading. The chaos on my
István Orosz: Dürer in the Forest, 1987, copperplate etching, 500 x 358 mm.
desk is drawn from my point of view (and it is not at all exaggerated), and I also appear in the round mirror I put in the centre of the etching. The cylindrical mirror should be placed right on this mirror, that is, on my face, in order to transform the chaos on my desk into a distorted image of Albert Einstein. Between the two layers of the picture, that is, the horizontal and the vertical, there is no relationship unless we think about such universal ideas as the contrast between order and chaos, between natural laws and human freedom.
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On re-reading the poem or Poe's comments on its creation, one senses that he is intentionally hiding something. The blurred mystical-metaphysicality of the poem and the provocative brainstorming of "The Philosophy of Composition" seem to be there to distract. So that you wouldn't recognize a soul torn by fear and doubt, so that you wouldn't take the first-person narrator seriously, so that you shouldn't identify him with Poe. He did not have a dead lover called Lenore, his room did not contain a bust of Pallas Athene; yet there is no doubt that the shadow of the raven hovers over Poe's soul, destiny and life. If you have not been aware of this, the fifth line of the penultimate stanza ("Take thy beak from out my heart") will reveal that here it is the poet speaking and not his narrator, slumped over his books. This is the first metaphor that re-interprets the whole poem as it has developed and clarifies the symbolic character of the bird.
Someone viewing my illustration (I would call any such person a co-creator) will place a cylindrical mirror onto that point which covers the bird's reflection in the wine glass; in so doing, my co-creator will emphasise the metaphoric interpretation of the poem and of the picture. In the mirror is reflected Edgar Allan Poe's virtual face, made up of the objects lying horizontally, the requisites of the illustration for "The Raven". Once the cylinder is raised, the face disappears, what is left are these scattered objects, the shades, the man lying on his face and the empty room.
Poe claims in his essay that the most important effect to be created in a work of art is that which allows it to be interpreted backwards. The conclusion explains all the parts of the composition and their role in the whole. Poe was true to this in most of his works. In fact, the same compositional scheme is at work for an anamorphosis that has a second meaning, since by placing a cylindrical mirror onto the centre of the paper, the viewer will realise why certain objects have been placed in the picture.
How can you distort an image so that it only becomes visible and recognizable in a mirror of the right size and from a certain angle? This is what I did: I selected a photograph of Poe and made a line-drawing from it. Then I produced a reflection of the picture (so that when its reflection appears in the mirror, the original image can be seen). I drew a grid of 11 columns and 9 rows upon the picture, adding numbers and letters for the sake of clarity. Then I drew eleven concentric circles from the centre of the illustration and split the area into nine pies. In other words I made a distorted form of the grid of squares. I then had to redraw the image in the small squares in the exact deformation into the exact plane figure. I placed the cylindrical mirror from time to time onto the centre to check the work. Once the squares are filled in correctly, Poe's image appears in the mirror. Now came the most interesting part: what I had to figure out was how the elements of the distorted image can be exchanged for other details, for other objects in the picture. How can a round desk-top stand for the curve of the forehead, a pen or a pencil for the eyebrow, a watch for a necktie, the shadow of the raven for the writer's waistcoat, etc. If we recall "The Philosophy of Composition", this is what artistic creation involves-logical composition and systematic sorting out within the possible solutions.
The procedure I have followed in composing an anamorphosis is actually what Poe suggested in his essay. What the artist should do is first to dismantle in order to deform reality and create a new but unreal world out of these realities with the help of his imagination. This creative process does not require inspiration-at least not according to Poe-and there is no place for irrational melancholy or for subconscious instincts. Art should stand apart from the uncontrollable flow of emotions, creativity should be led intellectually, so that pure art can be created merely on a mathematical basis.
I find it interesting that Poe expressed great interest in the characteristics of optics and visual perception. In his short story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", the detective, Auguste Dupin, explains how the details and the different viewpoints should be used to examine something as a whole-and then, with surprising precision, describes the technique of distorted perception:
Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found. The modes and sources of this kind of error are well typified in the contemplation of the heavenly bodies. To look at a star by glances-to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly-is to have the best appreciation of its lustre-a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. A greater number of rays actually fall upon the eye in the latter case, but in the former, there is the more refined capacity for comprehension.
When designing my anamorphosis to Poe's poem, I attempted to work with a conscious and calculating mind, but I was also aware of the traps such childish logic might lead me into. All I could hope for was that the 'inexplicable', too, always has and will have a role in all kinds of creative work. 
István Orosz: Sketches for the anamorphosis of Edgar Allan Poe's: "The Raven"
István Orosz
was born in 1951 and after training as a graphic designer, he first gained recognition as a stage designer and for his work in animated film as animator and director. His posters and graphic art have featured in countless international design exhibitions, and he is well-known as a printmaker and illustrator too. He is perhaps best known for his renewal of the technique of anamorphosis. This is an edited version of a lecture delivered at the AGIdeas Festival in Melbourne on 5 April, 2007.
