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Sat 10 Apr, 2004 10:13 am
Recently I was listening to an interview on by Terry Gross on NPR with Jasper Johns and he was talking about how he divided up the canvas into section before he painted. Occasionally I do that and was surprised the hear that it was a normal artistic technique.
Mostly I just draw then paint but I have the feeling when I look at an unfinished painting and feel in needs to be redone it has more to do with math than my personal sense of balance which might be math, how the hell would I know I managed to skip math as much as possible for years.
What do you think?
I remember doing a project like that in high school... My artistic ability is probably equal to that of a 10 year old when it comes to drawing and painting and the like.. But in the project, we took a magazine picture and divided it into squares, and concentrated on replicating each square (only twice as big so we couldn't trace lol) one at a time. My picture was of Elizabeth Taylor. It made it into the state finals. I was in awe with the results, mainly because I can't even draw a heart that looks symmetrical. I still have it around here somewhere.
I think painters have a finely tuned sense of balance that happens to coincide with mathematical theorems...HUH?
So then a sense of the way something looks can in the end be a matehmatical theroem, yikes that is a scary thought.
From a musicians point of view, mathematics is integral to music, I imagine it's the same in art. My father was an architectural renderer and 90% of his work involved algebra and geometry. Vanishing points etc...
The number phi keeps recurring in nature and art. Phi is obtained by adding 1 to the square root of 5 and dividing that by 2.
Phi, for one, is the ratio—1.6180339—between the short and long sides of the "golden rectangle." You multiply a line by phi to get the long side of the rectangle. This rectangle supposedly has great appeal though research hasn't substantiated this. Still, artists throughout history have used the "golden rectangle" in thier art.
The facade of the Parthenon is based on this ratio, and in Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, her face is an exact "golden rectangle."
If this has piqued you curiousity at all, just go to a search engine and type in phi, golden rectangle, nautilus, mona lisa etc.
a connection between maths and arts? funny ; )
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