Julian Beever

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

The technique

Beever's method is anamorphic projection done by hand. Instead of drawing a scene as it ought to look, he works out how it has to be stretched across the ground so that it looks right when it's photographed from one position, usually from a fairly low angle looking along the drawing. His book describes how each piece is planned, along with the practical problems involved, from officials to shiny paving that won't take chalk (Beever, 2010). Because a camera, like a single eye, sees from one point, a drawing designed for that point snaps into apparent depth there and nowhere else. My demo on the anamorphic art page works in 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 somebody else entirely. Many of his photographs include real people who appear to be 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 is still his signature, but he has also painted anamorphic works on other surfaces, and his success helped turn "3D street art" into a recognised genre that many artists around the world now practise.

Why chalk on a pavement teaches it so well

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