David Chelsea
Portland, Oregon

Rebecca’s Room

$4,000

To purchase this work please contact Laura at 23 Sandy Gallery.

Years before I wrote my own books about perspective, I was experimenting with pushing its outer limits. I had done a number of panoramic drawings using curvilinear perspective, and eventually I decided to go beyond that to a full 360° field of view, which can only be depicted without distortion on a spherical surface. My first spherical painting was a gift for my wife, a view of the garden on the roof of our loft building in New York painted on a wooden ball- quite small, only about one inch square.

At the time I thought I was the first person to have the idea of projecting perspective onto a spherical surface, but l have since learned that an artist named Dick Termes devised what he calls “Termespheres” in 1968, and he has been doing them ever since.

This particular piece was painted in acrylics on a world globe I bought at a yard sale. It depicts my son Ben and daughter Rebecca in Rebecca’s room circa 2002.

For reference, I took digital photos at the scene in all directions and loaded them into Lightwave, a 3-D animation program, where I arranged them around a central point in a kind of digital mosaic to form the view. The painting was begun in 2002 but languished for years while I was busy with other projects; I finally finished it in 2008.

Perspectively savvy viewers may point out that an image covering 360° ought to include parts of the artist himself- but if I were to go that route, more  than half of the image would logically need to be of the inside of my eye socket, so l decided to conceive of myself as a disembodied point in space. Others may object that my painting could only approximate the retinal image if it were painted on the interior of a sphere and viewed from the center, and they would be right, but l didn’t happen to have a ball large enough to get inside of (still don’t, in fact), and actually, the globe does provide a compelling illusion of an actual view- as it spins on its axis, it looks remarkably as if one were panning around an actual scene with a wide angle lens.

Acrylic on world globe, 12 inches diameter, 2008.

Artist Biography

David Chelsea was born in Portland Oregon in 1959. Educated at the School Of Visual Arts, Parsons Institute and The New York Academy of Art, David has been a commercial artist for over thirty years. His work has appeared in hundreds of publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Press, Seattle Weekly, Chicago Tribune, Reader’s Digest, Boston Phoenix and Portland Monthly.

A published cartoonist since the age of twelve, David has drawn comics for numerous publications and is the author of the graphic novels David Chelsea In Love, Welcome To The Zone and the how-to books Perspective! For Comic Book Artists and Extreme Perspective! For Artists. In recent years David has taken up the challenge devised by Scott McCloud, to draw an entire 24 page comic within 24 hours, a record thirteen times, and two of these stories have been printed in Top Shelf’s collection 24×2. As a natural outgrowth of his comics work, David has been in demand as a storyboard artist, working for advertising clients such as Tyee, Wieden+Kennedy and Hawthorne Direct, and for Whitewater Films on the feature Nearing Grace.

David lives in Portland’s historic Irvington’s district with his wife Eve, son Benjamin and daughter Rebecca.