The False Mirror

Artist

René Magritte was an outstanding Belgian surrealist artist. He started to create surrealist artworks in his twenties under the influence of Giorgio De Chirico, an Italian artist. Yet, Magritte’s work did not come into a period of great prosperity until he moved to Paris in 1927 and became friends with a French poet, also known as the founder of Surrealism, André Breton. Magritte was good at placing ordinary objects in very different settings to make the works fulfilled with hidden meanings or philosophic ideas. On looking at his work, viewers will usually be surprised by the unusual, even bizarre effect that the artist created; but then try to figure out the intriguing meaning behind what they see. Besides, Magritte’s unique style has influenced lots of later artists, including our familiar American artist, Andy Warhol.

Work

The work that I selected was The False Mirror, 1928. I chose it because I was first surprised by the huge eye covering the whole canvas. But then I realized its different iris replaced by blue, cloud-filled sky, which looks very comfortable and relaxing to me. Intentionally painting a sky scene as the iris, the artist created a situation where viewers can see through the eye, as through a window and being looked at by it simultaneously. The title “False Mirror” also challenges viewers to question what they see and the function of their eyes.

(Actually, I chose to reproduce this work because the other one I researched in the looking out assignment was Malevich’s The Black Square and that one might be too easy to reproduce in my opinion.) 

Approach

In order to embody the artist’s style of mixing reality and illusion, at first, I planned to photoshop a real eye photo by removing all the eye lashes and changing the iris part.

However, after finished that, I find the real eye “too flat”. That is, compared to the artwork, the shadow around the real eye is insufficient which makes the eye relatively lack stereoscopy. Without that stereoscopy, I find it hard to view the “eye” as a window where I can look through it as in the original piece. Thus, I decided to deepen the outline and background using “brushes” to emphasize the sense of shadow.    

Product

I tried to reproduce the artwork exactly as what I saw but still based on the primary eye structure. I used the eyedropper tool to pick the color from the artwork and brush tool to paint on the photo (sorry that I did not record the exact brushes or settings that I used, but it could probably be 27 brush with 50% spacing for clouds in the sky and 25 straight brush for the other strokes). Note that I cropped the photo to match the part shown in the artwork. Besides, on the left side of my work, somewhere below the middle, I left the medial canthus unpainted as a proof of the original photo used.

Reflection

The original artwork looks somewhat bizarre to me and I start to understand where the weirdness comes from after removing all the eyelashes :) Then, deepening the outline and white part of the “eye”, I think that my work also has relatively sufficient stereoscopy for viewers to experience the feeling of both seeing and being seen at the same time. I learned that the artist painted the shadow to guide our eyes to focus on the scene of sky and the center black spot. Compared to the dark background, the brighter sky looks at a distance and thus creates an illusion that the “eye” functions as a window. Besides, The False Mirror generates a sense of peace with artist’s exquisite skills. In order to imitate those fine and smooth strokes and the texture of the artwork more exactly, I will try using the pen tablet to control the brushes better. The current strokes in my work look too rough to make all colors compatible, which to some extent distract the viewers focus.

P.S. It is very amazing to see how Photoshop has been upgraded to imitate the stroke and texture effect of real materials and brushes as fine as possible. That makes the digital version more similar to the original artwork.