Artist Research Part 1.

Having considered the direction of my project I decided to choose the option which most intrigued me and was also my initial and strongest reaction to the project title - investigating life with perspective removed or altered, the ordinary made extraordinary by the way or even the angle from which it is viewed. From this starting point I started to search for images which inspired a stronger visual, as apposed to conceptual, direction within in the framework of the project.

There were two artists who naturally occurred to me when considering the idea of manipulation of perspective - MC Escher and Salvador Dali.

Escher occurred to me largely due to the famous lithograph 'Relativity' which depicts staircases within the same space but with 3 distinct different gravities, inhabited by different characters. Clearly this work demonstrates the relative perspective or position of these characters as different, but occurring simultaneously, an interesting concept inherently linked into my own perspective theme as each perspective is of course correct to the individual, but only one in reality could be possible.

Salvador Dali is mostly known for his work with surrealism. His paintings distort not only perspective but the shape and form of reality to create scenes that though reminiscent of the real are in fact completely impossible and part of their own separate reality. Although his work is fantastic example of perspective manipulation and abnormal reality it moves too far from my initial idea of a more simple manipulation of perspective within the real world (a similar problem occurs with Escher's impossible work). These initial areas of research exhausted I chose to explore more modern examples.

The first artist I looked at that I felt fitted in with this concept was a British street artist referred to as Slinkachu. Slinkachu's work involves using miniature people and items, replicas of ordinary things, but placing them in interesting location to add a secondary, miniature world into familiar settings (a miniature human pyramid to climb a curb, a tiny person crushed by  giant human foot etc) often for the purpose of social commentary or satire. This ties in to my initial thought about the way size is relative to how it is viewed, the small people see our world as enormous and full of obstacles, whilst we would view it as normal because it is designed for us and we fit within it.

I found through looking at Slinkachu there are actually two very similar areas of art - one involving the creation of miniature environments or scenes which are subsequently photographed in such a way as to make them appear normal or large scale. Another take on this is the use of perspective and photo manipulation to make normal scenes appear like the photographed miniatures. Both of these areas play with the distortion of reality and our perception of size, and are perhaps most interesting when they exist along side each other as this creates a further level of enigma - whether the images is a true miniature or not.

In a not dissimilar line I was able to locate a similar distortion of size created by French artist Francois Abalnet. His creation is a garden, able to be walked through and around, it can be viewed from many angles simply as a large space, made up of hills, grass and trees, however it is only when viewed correctly that the full intention becomes clear and the garden becomes an enormous green globe representing the Earth. This is interesting as a form of interactive art, but also due to the mystery created by enabling only one view point to truly reveal the scale of the piece.

In a similar line I was able to find another street artist who's work has recently become well known largely due to a growing online following. The artist, Julian Beever creates paintings on sidewalks and walls, which perfectly use the manipulation of perspective to create images which, when viewed from the correct angle appear three dimensional, but from the wrong angle show the way in which size must be distorted to transform a 2D image into 3D. His work has a sense of wonder and fun common to much street art, and also shows a great deal of complexity and planning in its execution.

The final artist, or artists, I looked at were photographers working in the field of forced perspective. These artists use the distance of the camera from their subject to make one area appear larger than it actually is, or may alter the camera angle so that the image itself appears to defy physics (for example, the word is turned on its side so men run on walls). Illustration has been used within this are before as a compliment to photography, with the alteration in the perspective coming from a drawing inserted somewhere within the photograph, at a location and size which adds a new, cartoon layer to it.