Hazards of Reproduction
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post I recommend highly.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Secret Symbols in the Sunday comic, above.—————————————————————————
As my regular readers know, I spent some time in art museums recently while on vacation. I saw some terrific art and came home inspired to get back to generating my own. Fortunately, art inspires not just artists but virtually anyone who opens themself up to it.
I believe that each species has a superpower: birds can fly, cheetahs are fast, and octopuses have genius-level intelligence and mind-boggling camouflage abilities. To my mind, the superpower of homo sapiens sapiens is creativity. Creativity can define, explain, infuse, invent, build, convince, implore, inspire, and devastate, to name just a fraction of its capabilities.
And so art of all kinds has the power to amaze us: books, movies, music, paintings, you name it. And it is especially true with an art form you cannot personally perform. If you can’t draw to save your life, watching someone else draw probably looks like magic. I feel that way about watching people play the violin. With that in mind, I’d like to divulge a trade secret that many non-artists seem amazed by but shouldn’t be.
Spoiler alert: If you finish reading this post, you may lose another tiny piece of your childlike wonder, like you did that one year when you found out that one thing about Santa Claus.
Olive Oyl and I sometimes like to take guided tours through museums and we did that recently at The Louvre and the Vatican Museum. We loved our guides for both museums and wanted to take them home with us and make them be our friends, but in each instance, they came across an image that they declared had a magical or mystical property—that being the sense that the eyes of the main subject follow you around the room.
I first heard people marvel at this phenomenon years ago regarding modern images of Jesus. “He’s looking right at you and no matter where you go in the room, he’s still looking at you!” Creepy, huh?
Last month, our tour guide at the Vatican claimed a Baroque painting of Jesus did that and marveled at its supernatural quality, while our guide at The Louvre a couple of weeks later pointed out that the Mona Lisa does that and marveled at the astounding abilities of Leonardo da Vinci.
Mona Lisa and a modern illustration of Jesus (not the one in the museum.)
There was much about da Vinci that is astounding but this eye thing simply isn’t. It is true that the eyes of some paintings appear to follow you around a room but it isn’t magical or even difficult to achieve. A child can do it. Here’s how: if the eyes of a 2-dimensional image are pointed straight at the viewer, they will be pointed straight at the viewer wherever she stands. Done. Nothing more to it than that. Here are two more paintings with eyes that will follow you around the room.
Here is a random French king (or maybe queen) and a self-portrait by Rembrandt. Neither of them are known to have had mystical powers but both will watch you move around a room.
I feel compelled to say I’m not trying to be a dick or criticize our tour guides. They were as knowledgeable as they were entertaining and I got a lot out of both of their presentations. But because they were so knowledgeable, I was surprised to hear them promote a silly notion that is so easily disproved. In both of those museums, there are literally hundreds of paintings of people looking directly at the viewer and all of them will follow you around the room. Here are a few more examples not included in either museum.
Norman Rockwell self-portrait, the original Felix the Cat, my own Bizarro cyclops baby.
There are many things that are truly mysterious and awe-inspiring about all of the arts—like why listening to a favorite piece of music can make you weep—but the phenomenon of “creepy eyes” is not one of them.
I hope you found this insider look at art informative and I encourage you to wander around rooms to see which works of art are watching you and which don’t even know you’re alive. Now let’s see if any of the characters in Wayno’s recent week of Bizarro cartoons give us the creeps…
I take back what I said above. If that Humpty Dumpty character’s eyes were following me around the room I’d damn sure be creeped out.
This works better if you slightly close the top flaps.
Like many men of my generation and later, Ive dressed like a child for the majority of my adulthood.
The other kind of needlepoint just wasn’t painful enough for Grandma.
Or, it could just be a small hairdryer.
I would hate to have a job in which I was constantly tempted to taste my clientele.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for making your eyes follow us around the room. If you enjoy our cartoons and appreciate that we offer them here for free without pop-ups, paywalls or clickbait, please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the links below. We’ll think of you each time we enjoy rainbow sprinkles on our soft serve.
Until next week, put some sunglasses on that Jesus painting if it’s creeping you out.
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