Julian Beever was born in Cheltenham, England in 1959, and attended Leeds Metropolitan University in England from 1979 to 1983. Julian is an English chalk artist, he started doing pavement art to fund his travels around the world. He then began anamorphic illusions in the early 1990s. Anamorphosis is the effect of distorting an image and the image only looks ‘normal’ by looking at it from a specific angle. If viewed from any other angles, the image would look distorted.

When Beever first started, he drew portraits of well-known people. This brought him a lot of publicity from the people that passed by. When he started with his anamorphic drawings, he became even more popular and he began to receive commissions to draw more. “I got started when I was in a pedestrian street in Brussels where an old garden had been removed. This left an unusual rectangle of paving slabs which gave me the idea to convert this into a drawn swimming pool in the middle of the high street! It worked so well I tried other variations such as a well with people falling in. I soon realized that if you could make things appear to go into the pavement you could equally make them appear to stand out of it,” says Beever. He is well sought out from companies around the world and has been in twenty-eight different countries.

People all around the world are interested in his works. This is because of the connectivity of the internet and how fast things spread. Our own resident Holyoke High School artist Mr. Greaney says, “Julian Beever is one of the best and well known modern ‘illusionist’ artists in the spirit of Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo.”

When Julian is preparing the project, he first tries and uses the sidewalk as guide lines. After he does that, he stretches the image out. If possible, he tries to incorporate objects on the sidewalk into the picture, using a camera to position and visualize where the image will be. Then he begins, doing his magic and making it pop out.

This image demonstrates how anamorphic art works and how viewing at a certain angle will give the desired look of the image:

These images are of his other works, as you can see it looks right from the proper angle, but if you look at it from another angle, it looks distorted and awkward.