Frank Stella, Jasper’s Dilemma, 1962

Mark Joshua Epstein: I’m going to ask you a tricky thing, which is that I’m going to ask you what you notice just with your eyes, what you can see just with your eyes.

Student: And I notice that it kind of—like, at first glance, it looks like it’s kinda just squares around it, but it just goes in a square-y spiral.

Student: It seems like two paintings of the same shape, but one’s black and white, and one’s full of color. But yeah, it’s sort of like fused together as one painting.

Student: I notice that, if you have a painting, it’s just flat on the wall. But it’s got some sort of illusion going on. And so, like, if you—at first glance, it just looks like a bunch of squares going on in the picture. But if you look closer, it can actually look like a tunnel that’s leading you somewhere you don’t know.

Student: It does look like a tunnel, but another way to look at it is, if you’re in the inside of, like, a pyramid, and you’re looking up at the ceiling of a pyramid, it looks like that you’re inside a pyramid.

Mark Joshua Epstein: I like that we’re talking about squares and rectangles, because actually, when Frank Stella started his career, he was making paintings that were mostly squares and rectangles. And then, when he goes later in his career, he starts to change that around a little bit.