All is proportion

I am sitting, a cup of tea, some good music, a brush in hand and i am gone. There is nothing better: I forget where I am, who I am, and all sense of time. As Picasso once said: "I leave my body outside the studio." Or something like that...

I am working on a picture of a lady on a mechanical horse. Why? What is the significance of that? I have no idea. If it "works" pictorially, then do it. Paint first, ask questions later. Too many questions and the muse runs screaming. She is very shy. You have too pretend that she is not there when she comes, but you know she is there because you have no idea what time it is, and you have forgotten your self again.

It occurs to me as I proceed, that the lines stop being objects and start to become something else. Pure proportion. Just a harmony of lengths, sizes, and shapes; a prototype Mondrian. Harmony, music, interval, number; all these things are related. It is the link between art, music, and science. A good painting vibrates, because of the resonance of its parts. Vibrates visually, and psychologically. Math and melody. Many of my paintings return to this theme. Sometimes the subject is the proportion of the human body, sometimes the mechanical aspect of movement, form and its function, but usually these are just examples of an underlying, all pervading intuitive sense that things fit together.

From the time of the Ancient Greeks, and before, people have been aware that certain proportions give an immediate harmonic result. An important example of this is the golden section, or divine ratio, Phi. Used in architecture for its aesthetic appeal as well as is mathematical qualities, it is found in nature in the proportions of plants and animals, and is applied to art, natures best interpreter,being used as a solid geometric compositional tool. Phi is the only number, out of all the numbers in the universe, that has the peculiar quality of its sum equalling its parts. Or, in other words, its proportion is so, that its smallest part is to its largest part, as its largest part is to the whole.

It is these thoughts that occupy me when I make a composition, often hiding Phi in the most unexpected places, and always aware that all is proportion.