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Spoke 

In 1968, Ronald Davis created a fantastical piece, Spoke. He poured layers of clear and pigmented liquid polyester resin into a mold, then backed the resin with fiberglass cloth. The work is a dodecagon, or twelve-sided shape, that reaches over eleven feet wide and nearly five feet high. But at only two-and-a-quarter inches deep, it almost feels like it sits flat against the wall. Davis was certainly going for an optical illusion. Approaching it from the side or viewing it up close, the composition appears to be two dimensional. Back away from the wall by a dozen feet, and out of the shiny surface pops a three-dimensional design.

The composition is like the head of an oscillating fan with twelve blades, viewed at a 45-degree angle. The blades radiate out from the center and reach the edges. There are random squiggles where colored resin was flowed, allowing a color beneath it to show through. Because of the perspective Davis uses, the center point is not truly at the center of the painting, but a little higher. To create the illusion of the work being tilted 45 degrees–or the viewer being above and tilting down to the work–the blades, or spokes, that reach to the top are shorter, and spokes to the front and sides are longer.

The illusion is further developed by the strategic use of color. A band across the bottom is cloudy pale purple and beige, representing the exterior of the fan if it were actually 3-D. Another area of beige demarcates a little spot inside the imagined fan head near the center. At the top, a band of beige feels like the inside of the fan head. The spokes are each made of a triangle, a slanted rectangle, or a combination of the two. In the back half, each spoke is one color. The top seven alternate pale blue to light lilac on the left and orangey-yellow and Kelly green on the right. The bottom five spokes are made of two colors each, with the darker of each pair being closer to the bottom and sides of the work. There is dark blue paired with light blue, mauve pink with orange, and burgundy with pink. It feels like the cloudy front wall is what is darkening the appearance of the spokes. Odder still, it begins to seem as if the spokes nearest four, five, seven, and eight o’clock are not like fan blades at all. Rather, they might be long triangles lying on the face of the fan head rather than inside it. The illusion is masterful.

Spoke was created backward. A painter typically applies paint to a canvas so that the first layer applied is the background and can be covered up by more layers. Here, Davis started by adding resin into a Formica mold. When finished and flipped over for display, the first layer applied becomes the top layer, not the bottom. The fluid resin dries and hardens and is polished, eliminating any marks made by the artist on the surface, and without colors bleeding into each other or mixing into new colors. Davis’s colors are cheerful, the illusion is disorienting, and the painting raises a great question of whether or not to trust one’s first impression.