In normal vision, all images are seen double except in the plane of focus where the images received by both eyes coincide. The varied, overlapping, and transparent doubled images provide a fascinating new complexity of composition. More significant from the plastic point of view, the effects of normal vision with two eyes vastly intensify the effects of three-dimensional space. While the basic impulse of these paintings springs from careful observation and analysis of the facts of natural vision, the pictorial result is highly subjective and interpretive, since the visual field is different for everyone and the intensity of the images from either eye vary and shift.

For over 50 years, from 1931 until his death in 1994, Harold Haydon pursued a unique compositional theory, which he called "binocular vision." He saw it as revolutionary, a radical new approach to painting composition just as significant as Cubism. He hoped, of course, that artists would rally around his invention and even feared at the beginning that it might be stolen from him.

Haydon exhibited his work often and wrote descriptions of it like the one above. He gave lectures and demonstrations. There were press reviews of his exhibitions and illustrations of his binocular paintings in the media. Having been a member of the major artists' organizations and having held office in several, Haydon was active in the Chicago artists' community. Clearly he was well known and liked, and other artists knew his work. But Haydon was always disappointed by the response he received to his binocular vision theory. In a 1951 letter to an old friend he lamented that he had "yet to see anything but superficiality and misunderstanding on the part of art critics." Part of the problem may be that while he was an able communicator and described his work well, he never fully explained how he derived the concept.

But, it is in "the how" and "the why" that the real story lies. There we find not only a complex, but also an extraordinarily fascinating tale that shows just how much Haydon was a product of his times. The early 20th century saw so many dramatic changes, not only in the social and political climate, but in educational reforms, art, music, literature, philosophy and perhaps most stunning of all the advances in modern physics that rewrote our very understanding of reality. Into these years was born Harold Haydon, the child of liberal and intellectual parents, a child with a fertile imagination and thirst for knowledge, and out of this experience would grow both his art and his ability to synthesize the climate of his times.