Inspired by the current Most Despised Visual Artist Thread, and my own comments there. Growing up, I’d look at the weird stuff that adults treated as “serious” art, and see things that obviously weren’t supposed to be there. Or at least interptreted that way. This my comment on the Giant Crab Claw in the background of Hunt’s “The Scapegoat”. That’s what I get of a childhood filled with Chiller Theater and Creature Feature – I see Monsters everywhere.
Another example is John Constable’s The Cornfield:
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/resourcesd/con_corn.jpg
We had a copy of this hanging over our piano, so I got to look at it a lot while practicing (and when I was supposed to be practicing, but wasn’t). Now, as reasponsible adults not soaked in a lifetime of cheap monster flicks, you probably see a Romantic Pastoral scene of a boy taking a break from driving the sheep out to the field, getting himself a sip from that typhoid-laden stream.
But I look at that treetop to the upper right, and I don’t see a treetop. I see a giant, grinning Tyrannosaurus Rex head leering down at the boy’s butt and thinking he would make a tasty morsel.
Anybody else have such weird personal misinterpretations of paintings?
There have been a few threads at SDMB about the things people have seen in the etching of money and stamps, etc. Several where the queen’s hair seemed to have a devil, or a tree had Hitler. You can see them once they are pointed out. Some perhaps were actually intentional. When I paint I often add an odd thing or two as I go. Usually something will strike me as being “almost odd” and then I touch it up just enough to make it inivisble until known and then impossible to ignore.
So, yeah, I see extra stuff everywhere. Like castles in the clouds, and faces in the folds of every blanket.
A lot of those a Snopes-type shared delusions, usually with a political purpose. It’s even been suggested that the Devil in the Queen’s Hairdo was intentional.
But I don’t think anyone else has claimed to see Jurassic Cornfield before. But i saw saw (and see) it every time I look at that picture.
And don’t get me started on the Battering Ram in the marble veins on my Church’s altar. I was an altarboy and had to look at it all the time. It didn’t help that it was fake marble, and that the pattern repeated, so I saw a battering ram every five feet.
If you leave me alone in a room for any inordinate length of time with nothing to do, I will sure as shit deface the covers of any magazines lying around with my trusty fine point pen.
Oh, wait. Here’s a better story relating back to my Catholic schoolboy days.
Around Easter, my kindergarten teacher asked me to ask my grandfather for a picture of Jesus for the classroom. My grandfather, a fine arts professor, obliged with a nice charcoal crucifixion sketch. My teacher was so taken with the picture she hung it above the classroom door with a thumbtack, where it fluttered ever so gently in the breeze whenever the door opened. This went on all week.
Now, as a kid my best friend in the world was a wiseass named Wesley. THIS BASTARD was just… I dunno. Warped, man. An unrepentant smart-ass, even at age five. I am the man I am today in large part because of the warped effect of Wesley’s sense of humor did on my sense of shame.
Wesley nudges me and points towards the door after someone left the classroom. The picture swung back and forth on the wall. Wesley uttered the words, “… there goes Jesus, dancin’ on the cross.”
