Curious how the viewer of a painting could become an active participant, I composed a three-frame painting where the background in one frame becomes the foreground in another and the viewer’s perspective zooms in and out following the flow across the layered landscapes.
We experience multiple perspectives of the same space at the same moment in time—similar to a Mobius Strip where we simultaneously see one surface from two perspectives.
Flight Path
The Heron…
…and the Dove…
…connect in the foreground of the center frame.
They take flight into the background reconnecting at a distant three-tiered waterfall in the center frame.
The Heron, perched on a rock glowing orange red. The Dove, gliding through waterfalls blue and violet.
Their flight path loops forward to the mid-ground on the right frame—the same three-tiered waterfall seen from closer in.
The Heron and the Dove follow the flow of the pond in the right frame to the pond in the center frame—back to the starting point like the center of a Mobius Strip. Once more they take flight to the background, this time reconnecting at the distant sunset cliffs near the waterfall of gold.
Their flight path loops forward again, but this time to the mid-ground of the left frame—the same sunset cliffs and river of gold seen from closer in.
Following the flow of the current, the Heron and Dove return once again to the foreground of the center frame—continuing their Mobius Trip.
Space and Time
The flight pattern of the Heron and the Dove is a figure eight. In and out between foreground, mid-ground and background their path stitches the three painting frames together.
Space is layered…time is fluid
Space is compressed…time is unleashed
Space and time are woven together in a continuous current of flowing water. An eternal spring streaming in and out of the frames. Back and forth forever.
Frames
The painting format is composed of three frames that are simultaneously:
adjacent to one another—stitching together a seamless landscape of cliffs and waterfalls
overlayed onto one another—melding a single event, a single point in time, across multiple frames
Each individual frame is simultaneously an independent perspective and a shared perspective, cohesive across the other frames.
We can’t be in two places at the same time? A self-imposed limitation that we can soar beyond.
The frames, like the single Mobius Strip surface, unfold through space and time. A playground for the viewer soaring through the frames with the Heron and the Dove.
Re-orienting
A Mobius Strip is defined as a non-oriented surface. We can redefine it, and this painting, as a multi-oriented surface.
The viewer experiences multiple perspectives of a single event and multiple events from a single perspective. Layered together the viewer moves in and out between them.
Re-orienting our own path.
Re-framing our own experience
Active participation
This study expands beyond traditional renaissance paintings where we the passive viewer are constrained to a fixed perspective. Released from our one-point perspective cage, we are free to lift off into the painting. Rather than looking into the frame from outside we are immersed within it. On our own flight path in and out of the landscape:
we experience space looping back onto itself
we experience time in separate frames all at once
we experience the Mobius Trip
