It started with a little oil on canvas. Artist Seamus Wray called it: ‘a self portrait painting myself’. The reception was positive on both reddit and Instagram.

“We need to go deeper”, an often quoted line from the film Inception, reverberated throughout the comment section on both social networks. So Seamus obliged and a series was born.

 

 

This type of recursive painting is known as the Droste effect and is described as:

“The Droste effect, is the effect of a picture recursively appearing within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear, creating a loop which theoretically could go on forever, but realistically only goes on as far as the image’s quality allows. [source]