Das Week 2: Math and Art

History of Infinity by Becca Wittebols
http://mathhombre.blogspot.com/p/mathart.html

            In all honesty, as an artist myself, I never thought of math as closely related to my craft. I had an admiration for calculus and problem solving, but math did not love me back, resulting in poor grades and outlook on the subject. However, this week’s lecture allowed me to reconsider its beauty, and some insights I gained revolved around the relationship, the push and pull, between art and science, specifically in regards to the art of perspective. Perspective has always come easy to me growing up, art just runs in my blood, I just didn’t have the technical terminology to define things like a vanishing point until taking proper classes. However, once the vocabulary appeared, so did the mathematical ideas, the measurements, the formulas, and relearning this through this week’s materials was re-inspiring. Finding the balance in these two ideas is incredibly interesting and critical to our development in all areas as a society, we cannot truly have one without the other. The three references that helped me form this observation were due to our class discussion on Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, and the Golden Ratio, in which our talks on iconic pieces of art, from the Parthenon to the Mona Lisa, stemmed from the very thing I was convinced had no influence on my sketchbook; math. 

Mona Lisa Golden Ratio
arthipstoryhova and the golden ratio | arthipstory

The piece of art I’ll choose to go into depth is the Mona Lisa, one of the most iconic pieces in history. It’s such an intriguing thing to look at something you’ve known your entire life with new eyes, and this lecture allowed me the opportunity to do so - the opportunity to find math in everything from da Vinci to geometric beadwork to crochet coral reefs, all emphasizing some kind of beauty in this world and using mathematics the whole time. It’s easy, even as a creator, to dismiss art as simple inspiration and visual aesthetic, without placing numbers like 1:0.618 behind choices. Knowing that there can be so much thought and structure behind something so unstructured and free is almost grounding, a juxtaposition that can be attributed to mathematics, art and science alike - an equal push and pull relationship that completes each other. Art is not always subjective - If you dig deeper in all art, from music to drawing, there will almost always be an intricate and exciting explanation rooted in our fundamental understandings of the world and numbers.

Coral Forest at the Museum of Arts and Design (NYC)
Photo by Jenna Mascom for MAD
https://crochetcoralreef.org/about/theproject/



SOURCES:

Contemporary geometric beadwork. CONTEMPORARY GEOMETRIC BEADWORK. (n.d.). Retrieved April 8, 2022, from https://beadmobile.wordpress.com/ 

Crochet Coral Reef. (n.d.). Retrieved April 8, 2022, from https://crochetcoralreef.org/about/theproject/ 

Leonardo DaVinci and the Golden Section - Math Central. (n.d.). Retrieved April 8, 2022, from http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/beyond/articles/Art/DaVinci.html 

Mona Lisa. The Fibonacci Sequence. (n.d.). Retrieved April 8, 2022, from https://thefibonaccisequence.weebly.com/mona-lisa.html 

Vesna, Victoria. “Mathematics-pt1-ZeroPerspectiveGoldenMean.mov.” Youtube, Uploaded by uconlineprogram, 9 Apr. 2012, https://youtu.be/mMmq5B1LKDg






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