15). Fish are swimming around you, and you have a fisheye (this is your eye!) view of the cat. He has also painted many cathedrals and other buildings onto spheres. Termes did his preliminary sketches on location at such places as the steps of the Paris Opera, the lurking grounds of the phantom of the opera. He sometimes uses his own patented camera, which he mounts on the sides of regular solids, such as dodecahedra. Photographs taken from all sides of the solid are matched up and reproduced onto actual dodecahedra which adults and children can reconstruct from their flattened forms.

objects in the room look big and small like a visual Doppler effect. (See Figure 3). Squeezing inside the cylinder and looking around produces the truest view. In fact, you don't need to be sitting in the center of the room: you can be located anywhere within the room and the perspective grid will still work.
    Confused? Try the wonderful training exercises, abundantly illustrated, in Termes's book, New Perspective Systems. Now the plot thickens. To understand 5-point perspective, think of looking directly through a transparent hemisphere which has been formed by slicing a sphere vertically. Facing into it, paint the world around you onto the inside of the hemisphere. Observe the vanishing points east and west, zenith and nadir, and north - the points to your left and right, above and below you, and straight in front of you. Stand back, so the hemisphere looks flat like a disk, and you will find the center of the disk (which was straight ahead) is in fact the north vanishing point. This is 5-point perspective. (See Figure 4).
    Perhaps you now see 6-point perspective quite literally coming around the corner. Just add the vanishing point to the south, that is, behind you. You now see two disk-like drawings - one for the view ahead, and one for the view behind you. Or if you are Dick Termes, you turn around and around and reproduce the view onto a sphere. Now any couches or television cabinets in a room that had disappeared at the edges of disks in 5-point perspective, continue on. Of course, you are seeing the picture from outside the sphere. But to Termes, translating a concave view (from inside the sphere) to a convex one (on the outside) is a simple and natural exercise, one which definitely adds to our interest. Incidentally, if these six vanishing points are making you think of the six faces of the cube or the six vertices of its dual, the octahedron, your thinking is on the right track.
    Is this life in a fishbowl? Well, yes. Termes has painted life from the inside of a fishbowl in his painting Fishbowl. (See page

of two hemispherical polyethylene fixtures which are lightly glued together. A scene is painted on the sphere with acrylic paints, which are then put into an oven. The paints melt to the plastic, and as the plastic melts into the disks, the distortions of 5-point perspective are perfectly maintained. The flat paintings on the disks are now reproduced as silk-screens and the process is put into reverse. The silk-screens are printed onto plastic disks which are returned to the oven to be blown back into hemispheres which are then glued together to be reborn as Ter-