[Garth Herrick]

Hi Nathan and all:

I became suddenly aware of the mirror phenomenon you describe at about the same time you first posted a year and a half ago.

Here's what happened:

I photographed a good friend's body of small still life paintings, about thirty in all. In Photoshop I was processing each individual digital image painstakingly, when I accidentally flipped one painting to its mirror reverse. I was shocked my friend's painting composition completely fell apart in reverse, and yet it looked perfectly stable when viewed normally!

I tested all 30 paintings and they all miserably failed as compositions in reverse. Then I had the nerve to telephone my friend and tell him how his paintings did not work in reverse!

His response was matter of the fact that he did not care if they did not hold up in reverse because that is not how he intended them to be viewed. But he also admitted that he has never in his life tested his compositions in a mirror.

I said I compulsively check mine in a mirror every hour, flip them upside down, and sideways too. He asked me why, stressing none of that is even necessary.

I soon came to realize that almost all Western art, if not all art, including sculpture becomes very unstable in a mirror view. My friend thought I should write a serious treatise on this. When I told my portrait agent about my discoveries, she said Garth, this has already been done, it was all in a chapter of a book she had.

Rudolf Arnheim's "Art and Visual Perception" was first published in 1954, and more than covers this human perceptual phenomenon. In a nutshell, it seems we humans at least in the Western tradition, read all images and compositions from left to right. Simply put, what looks correct from left to right , does not necessarily hold up from right to left.

Apparently perception has a set directional flow, just as time does.

So the bottom line is: Nathan, don't worry about how your drawing looks in a mirror, because it looks fine to everyone else as you drew it.

Garth