The quest to create the illusion of a three dimensional reality on a two dimensional surface could be seen as the defining theme of the western painting tradition. Thus art history often focuses on how the methods of creating such illusions developed; first in ancient Greece, and again during the Renaissance. The story of how Renaissance artists rediscovered and refined these techniques has been well told, and it is easy to imagine the excitement that those artists felt, resurrecting that ancient knowledge to spectacular effect.

There is another side to this story though, which explains why this knowledge keeps getting lost, or rejected, for lifelike painting has not always been popular. It is hard now to understand the shock and horror with which some of the early Greek experiments with illusionistic representation were met: Plato described such painting as ‘akin to witchcraft’ and insisted it have no place in the realm of the good. This distaste for illusionistic representation also won out in the dark ages, for whatever historical reasons, and interestingly seems to have resurfaced again in modern times. For example, the twentieth century sculptor Giacometti insisted that to him the stylised figures in Egyptian art seemed more real than those of the late Renaissance, in which the lighting and perspective effects of a moment in time had been perfectly captured.

This is the dark side of the story of art; these times when the illusions reveal themselves for what they are. I came to understand how it feels to perceive representational art this way accidentally, by doing a lot of life drawing. If you look hard enough at a picture it eventually dissolves into a flurry of marks. It is quite uncanny. I painted the five pictures below in an attempt to explain, in the language of art, the process through which pictures changed for me. They are all loosely self portraits, and work a bit like a comic strip.