A 1,000 Words

Kurt Wenner, "Flying Carpet"

Few people, even artists, stop to realize that art is the highest form of mathematics.  Just as language has informal and formal forms, mathematics has formulae and aesthetics.  Language has grammar and vocabulary, art has principles and elements.  Mathematics is to art what language is to poetry.  Mathematics are the tools by which we create beauty and harmony.

In language, we arrange words in a meaningful ways.  The writer's job is to make that arrangement the most pleasing and harmonious composition possible.  In mathematics, we arrange numbers in meaningful ways.  The artist's job is to arrange the numbers in ways that we want to hang on our wall or go to a museum to see.

Music is nothing but mathematics.  It is the science of vibration and harmonics massaged into glorious sound.  Music uses time, sine waves and vibrations in order to create individual sounds that are then blended into deeply moving compositions.

Art uses light, shadow, perspective, and spacial relationships.  It uses shape, form and function.  It blends these geometric and physical concepts into images that evoke emotional responses in the viewer.  Art is numbers given voice, because the greatest art speaks to us in a voice that we intuitively know is that of the Universe itself.

How many of us analyze the way we perceive the Universe?  How do we know what something feels like by looking at a photo of it?  How do we know something is further or higher than another?  You may think these are elementary questions, but try closing one eye for a day and going about your normal routine.  Without stereo vision, what clues are you using to navigate the world?

Here's a fun and easy experiment.  Take a friend or family member and sit them in a dark room.  Take a portable light source, say a flashlight, and move the flashlight around their head.  Try every position - up, down, sides, back, dead on.  How do you feel when you see their head lit from different positions?  Which ones "feel" right and which "feel" wrong?  Which frighten you and which attract you?  Which ones are boring and which exciting?

Now ask yourself, "Why do I feel these things?"

It is not an easy question and the answer requires many hours of deep reflection.  That is art.

We all know the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is why.  It is easier to show artistic principles than it is to describe them because the language we need is visual.  Try describing a shadow to a blind person.  Try telling them the difference between red and green.  Better yet, take your blind friend to the Louvre, stand them in front of the Mona Lisa and tell them why everyone marvels at that picture.  It can be done, but it will take a long time and the right vocabulary.

How many of us stop to consider that a trapezoid is just a square viewed from one edge?  That means that pyramids are cubes viewed from a certain perspective.

Art is a rabbit hole that causes us to turn our Universes upside down and start thinking about what our senses are telling us.  This is the primary difference between great art and crap.  Art that doesn't clarify some universal secret or take us out of our complacent lives is NOT art.  It is just noise, and the world is full of noise.

Art is the glory of silence.  As anyone who has ever tried to record silence knows, there is no such thing.  But, there is the control of noise to create softness and harmony, and that is art.

Control of noise is done through mathematics, and when that control rises to its highest expression, that is art.  Regardless of which sense is receiving the noise, we can mathematically organize the noise to make it pleasing to our senses.  That is the artist's job.

The more we observe our Universe, the more we appreciate the great works of art.  And if you need proof that art exists beyond the senses, then remember that one of the greatest painters (Claude Monet) was blind, and one of the greatest composers (Ludwig von Beethoven) was deaf.

Tricks Of Light And Shadow

You've probably received an email at some time in your life showing a guy doing chalk drawings on the street that, from a certain perspective, look amazingly 3D.  His name is Kurt Wenner and he is currently exhibiting several of his works, along with some Indonesian artists, here at the Ciputra Artpreneur Center.

Preserved on canvas, these pieces lie flat on the floor or form a 90-degree angle with the wall.  When viewed through a wide-angle lens, ghostly three-dimensional images pop out of the canvas, appearing to rise out of the background or apear in front of it.  It's really quite amazing and something photos just don't quite capture.  Makes you wonder how Kurt views the world.

What the art works highlight is the weird world of perception.  How we view the world and what reality is comes down to a matter of perspective.

In the midst of all the excitement, an email pops in from my Canadian bud and long-time ex-pat.  It contained a quote that he found "out there":

“Given the fact that it has been proven that our moon is a very suspiciously perfectly placed artificial satellite that is composed of non-naturally occurring material without which we could not have life on this planet combined with the fact that our Earth is very suspiciously the only place within our solar system and very likely our galaxy that can support life there is absolutely no question in my mind that, at the very least, the entire surface of our planet and all of its life forms are in fact nothing more than elements of a very large and complex software system that is being used to run what I am completely convinced are military experiments by some non-humanoid entity.”

I shot back:

"This is just a take on the ancient concept that we create the Universe through our collective consciousness.  The Hindus and Buddhists place this idea at the center of their beliefs.  The idea of a holographic reality or software simulation is just modern terminology wrapping the same concepts."

Seems this week's theme is 'perception', since everywhere I turn there are hints about reality not being all that real and our minds creating Creation.  It's strange how Life keeps throwing theme weeks at us.  It's like Bogart week on the Million Dollar Movie or something.  Just more proof that we create our reality, or it's created for us on a regular basis.

Related to that, do people really have premonitions, or does the intensity with which they think something create the situation?  My father used to think of people he hadn't talked to in years and out of the blue they would call or contact him within 24 hours.  This was before the internet and you could track most people down fairly easy.  But you have to ask, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

As Wenner's work shows, perception is all a matter of perspective.  One step in any direction and the world we see changes quite radically.  For those who see beyond the 'trick' of light and shadow, the paintings represent a profound look at reality.  Suppose we all exist on a canvas that appears three-dimensional and solid, until you shift to the side just a bit.

Perhaps if we all mentally stepped to the side and looked at the world from a slightly different perspective, we might see something completely unexpected and remarkable.  Of course, it begs the question what would we do if we found out the Universe was just a construct of imagination?

Happy Friday!