Sometimes a work-of-art catches your eye, for a reason.
Seeing has a visual grammar. Nobody taught it to you, but your eye follows it every time you look at a painting. These works use it better than most. Let me show you.
Meaning is what you come up with when you try to make sense of what you see. I’m more interested in the part before it: the first few seconds, when your eye has already gone somewhere, and you haven’t decided anything yet. What did the artist do to send it there?
That’s the question this site is built around.
I spent a year trying to answer it. Most of what I tried didn’t work. What finally did was a camera tied to the text. As you scroll from one paragraph to the next, the view moves with you—zooming in, pulling back, and landing on the part of the painting the words are describing. You don’t steer it. The sequence is already choreographed. Just scroll.
Click on an artwork above to begin. Try one and see what happens.
Alan Just