Today I am having some 90's nostalgia. When I was young, I would spend time at the mall with friends. We would roam aimlessly as a form of entertainment. We would spend hours getting ready to go to the mall. We hoped we meet a guy and achieve the status of "going out" and maybe have a pretzel. Going out, was a funny designation, as most of us never went anywhere. We just announced to the school that this guy was ours.
As we roamed the mall, it was inevitable that we would pass Spencers. Spencers was a store full of mugs with curse words, lingerie, crude jokes games and *gasp sex paraphernalia. Things my family would never approve of. Just walking into this store felt like I was doing something wrong. This intrigued us all the more.
We slipped into Spencers, moving covertly along to perimeter, trying to appear to look only at the appropriate toys and games. I mostly only looked at these, but every now and then, I allowed myself a peak at unmentionables. What on earth was all that for? At the back of the store, was a safe zone - a Magic Eye Poster.
For a flash in the 1990s, the Magic Eye, an infamously frustrating optical illusion, posters bearing the brightly colored op-art infiltrated the walls of suburban malls. Magic Eye poster were something of a paradox: a deliberate graphic mess that relied on grids and precision to achieve its intended effect. The fact that it was so difficult to see the 3-D shape hiding behind the hypercolored patterns was a major part of its appeal.
To find the secret image, people adopted a signature Magic Eye stance: bent forward, hands-on-hips, staring dumbfounded at the visual static in front of them. The others who crowded around (there were always others) passed along tips like an unsuccessful game of telephone—Cross your eyes. No, squint. Try relaxing. Suddenly the image would appear. Every illusion would appear eventually as long as you know how to look at it. The most successful understand that and they don’t try to force it, and relax, the image would reveal itself.
Some would never allow themselves to let go enough to allow them to see the autostereograms. I always could. Over time I got so good at it, that I could see them within seconds. The development of an artist is much like this.