MONSTER BRAINS

Rex Whistler








"Rex Whistler is perhaps best remembered for his witty representations of two faces in a single picture, although these were not seen by him to reflect his most important work. His upside-down drawings hardly feature in his brother's account of his life and drawings. For example, there is a Whistler restraunt in the Tate Britain art gallery, London, which contains a large mural he painted when only a young man. He also illustrated books, designed stage sets and was noted for his trompe l'oeil paintings. Nonetheless, it is his upright/inverted faces that have proved most intriguing to students of perception. The two faces typically share eyes but the inverted one is generally unrecognizable until the design is itself inverted. " - quoted from a pdf file titled "The Two Faces of Rex Whistler" with a small article and interesting artworks related to inverted faces available for download from perceptionweb.com here.

"When war broke out, though he was 35, he was eager to join the army. He was commissioned into the Welsh Guards as Lieutenant 131651. His artistic talent, far from being a stumbling block to his military career, was greatly appreciated and he was able to find time to continue some of his work, including a notable self portrait in uniform now in the National Army Museum. In 1944 he was sent to France following the D-Day Landings. In July he was with the 2nd (Armoured) Battalion in Normandy as the invasion force was poised to break out of the salient east of Caen. On the hot and stuffy 18th July his tank, after crossing a railway line, drove over some felled telegraph wires beside the railway, which became entangled in its tracks. He and the crew got out to free the tank from the wire when a German machine gunner opened fire on them, preventing them from getting back into their tank. Whistler dashed across an open space of 60 yards to instruct its commander, a Sergeant Lewis Sherlock, to return the fire. As he climbed down from Sherlock's tank a mortar bomb exploded beside him and killed him instantly, throwing him into the air. He was the first fatality suffered by the Battalion in the Normandy Campaign." - quote source

Check out more illustrations by Rex Whistler here.

More of the weird face drawings can be found here.

Article at Wikipedia