What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [105]
She also learned about the long and fascinating history of anamorphosis as an art form. It is well known that Leonardo da Vinci was intensely interested in using mirrors for his art. Among other things, he used mirrors to critique his paintings, according to Mark Pendergrast in his absorbing book Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection. “Why does a painting seem better inside a mirror than outside it?” da Vinci puzzled in his notebook, a question he posed using a mirror-writing technique in which characters can only be deciphered with the aid of a mirror.
Such esoteric aesthetics were far removed from the world that Myrna was born into in 1942. Growing up in Union, New Jersey, the first of two daughters of Victor Goldblatt, a successful accountant, and his wife, Lillian, a homemaker, she considered herself the black sheep of the family. Her childhood was “ninety-eight percent miserable,” a condition she attributes to her father’s persistently critical nature. “Nothing was ever good enough. ‘Are you sure you’ve looked at this?’ ” she recalled being asked regularly, as if everything one did could be computed like a column of figures. Her greatest accomplishment as a child was winning a citywide poster contest on the unfortunately worded theme of “Help the Helpless. Give to Sister Kenny.” Myrna turned the language around and created a poster that read: “Help the Helpful. Give to Sister Kenny.” Her victory validated a vague sense that she possessed creative talent.
Still, she had little idea what she wanted to pursue when she left home for Syracuse University. She graduated with a degree in fine arts in 1965 and then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she began work on a master in art education degree at Lesley University. She moved to Montclair, New Jersey, in 1978 and taught art at a school for the developmentally disabled. The next year, she married a lawyer six months after meeting him at a party. Nell was born in October 1982, the day before Myrna turned forty. Myrna was divorced three years later, after six years of marriage.
Since she first stumbled on mirror art, she has doggedly experimented with anamorphosis. She began by manipulating illustrations on the page over and over again until she nailed the right amount of distortion of an image and, reflected upward, it reassembled itself into a recognizable image on a reflective cylinder, usually placed near the top of the drawing. It is an admittedly difficult concept to grasp in the abstract. But seen and experienced, it beguiles and captivates. “I just did it for the fun of it. It was trial and error. I kept looking in the mirror and adjusting as I went, to get my drawing right,” she said. “After a while, your brain starts to lay down new neural pathways, and you know how to distort the images to make them work.”
A few months later, she hired a mathematician and a computer programmer, who used the grids she had gotten from the Edinburgh Encyclopedia to create a proprietary computer program that would allow her to morph any image, including photographs. She also commissioned illustrators to make drawings she could morph with the help of the computer program. She included them, along with a Mylar-wrapped cup, in a children’s coloring activity kit, which she patented. Now she had a product to sell, and investors “wanted in on it from the beginning. But they usually wanted a big chunk. Or they wanted to put their nephews in charge. But at that time, I didn’t really need the money. I knew who I wanted to work with and what I wanted to keep. I didn’t want to give up creative rights and control. And I still don’t.”
However, keeping tight control