Julian Beever

Julian Beever is an English artist known for chalk drawings on pavements that, from one particular spot, look like three-dimensional scenes rising out of or plunging into the ground: swimming pools in the street, chasms opening under passers-by, giant figures reaching up from the paving. From anywhere else, the same drawing is a long, distorted smear of chalk on flat stone.

The technique

Beever's method is hand-made anamorphic projection. Rather than drawing a scene as it should look, he works out how it has to be stretched across the ground so that it looks right when photographed from one position, usually a fairly low angle looking along the drawing. His book describes how each piece is planned and the practical problems involved, from officials to shiny paving that won't take chalk (Beever, 2010). Because a camera, like one eye, sees from a single point, a drawing designed for that point snaps into apparent depth there and nowhere else. The anamorphic art page has a demo that works the same way: a box painted flat on a pavement that only stands up from one viewpoint.

Beever began drawing on pavements in the UK and Europe in the 1990s, and his work spread widely online in the 2000s, often reposted without credit or credited to someone else. Many of his photographs include real people apparently interacting with the drawing, stepping over a chasm or dipping a toe in a pool, which makes the illusion instantly understandable.

Beyond the pavement

Pavement chalk remains his signature, but he has also painted anamorphic works on other surfaces, and his success helped make "3D street art" a recognised genre that many artists around the world now practise.

Why it matters to perception

Beever didn't invent anamorphosis; it goes back to the Renaissance and earlier (Baltrušaitis, 1977). What his work shows, unusually clearly, is how completely the visual system relies on a single, consistent viewpoint to interpret a scene. Step away from the spot and the depth collapses into flat chalk, which makes the mechanism easy for anyone to grasp, and to try with a box of chalk. The same viewpoint dependence underlies forced perspective photography and the Ames room.