Venue: Manhattan. Social gathering for fans of sacred geometry.
Wine, and cheese, along with a presentation from Dorothea Rockburne
I approach painting in a way which takes as a given certain conventions while questioning others. Consider the convention of the rectangle itself. When I focus my seeing, my peripheral vision does not frame itself into a rectangle. It therefore becomes necessary to consider the rectangle as perhaps generating itself through itself. With this in mind I chose the Golden Section and the square of that as the beginning format.
The choice of the Golden Section and Sacred Geometry as a touchstone for my artwork is ultimately based on the notion of substructure. As one's thought and experience are formed and used a delicate moment occurs when the discovered becomes understood, known, and consequently incorporated. This then is substructure, those many irretrievable operations behind the frontally evident. To study the Golden Mean is to study the very nature of our universe.
Underlying the structure of most ancient art, especially Egyptian and Greek, are the proportions derived from "the Golden Mean" and from Pi. This geometric tradition continued throughout the Renaissance, well into modern times. However, teaching these ancient proportions began to wane after
World War I with the revolutionary DADA movement in France. Today this vocabulary has pretty much been erased from the art-making dialogue.
Because of my early Beaux Art education and later my passion for mathematics, Geometry, and Egyptian art, I found myself compelled to re-examine this mysterious proportion, which seems to govern most things in nature, including me. Through the language of art I have tried to posit the concept that mathematics and the Golden Mean evoke in each of us an emotion that is both ancient and archetypal. Since our bodies are based on the Golden Mean, viewing the Golden Mean evokes in us a bodily response. This presentation will examine my use of combining the Golden Mean with Topology in contemporary art. This is the history of my life's work.