I want you to look at all the colors in Lemon Look. The majority of the canvas is yellow and orange alternating stripes, but five stripes in on either side, where the pattern dictates a stripe of orange is a stripe of pink. These are the only colors on the piece, and the existence of these three colors is what I want you to hold in your head as the reality.

Now, align yourself with the center of the painting and take a few steps back, about five feet. If you're looking at the painting on a screen, this will still work, but you'll have to mess around with the distance. Pick a point in the center of the painting, be it yellow or orange, and stare at it for as long as you can without blinking.

If you're doing this right, and your eyes are not moving, or moving very minimally, then the pink stripes should be fading away and being replaced by orange stripes. Some people report that the pink stripes entirely vanish. For me, they sort of phase in and out. And it makes my brain tickle in the most delightful way. And this is precisely the tickling that an illusion can cause us.

But let's take this a step further. As you look at the canvas, as you stare at that center point, try to hold onto one or the other, either the perception or the reality. Even though you do not see the pink stripe, hold onto your belief that the pink stripe exists. Or harder yet, even though you know that the pink stripe is there, try to believe that it does not exist.

Now Lemon Look was painted by Gene Davis, who belonged to a school of painting known as the Washington Color Painters, and who painted many, many striped canvases just like this one. He is a man whose life and ideas deserve much more of our time, and whose work is begging for a much deeper analysis than simply turning it into an optical parlor trick, and we will give him both of these in an audio story that is far down the line but already steeping. However, I don't think we've gone too far astray from how he would have wanted us to view his paintings. If you read the card, it will provide you with this brilliant quote from his 1975 interview with Donald Wall: