~Art is Not a Science~
"When you cannot express it numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind." ~British Physicists, Lord Kelvin~(1824-1907)
Lord Kelvin was of course referring to the furtherance of science. The problem is, however, that Art will never be a science and yet science has been at the core of making art for hundreds of years, and yet, many artists maintain that art is and should be exclusively intuitive process but, once thoughts cross the right to the left hemisphere the brain, we do indeed think rationally, and we do in fact use both sides of the brain in most of our thought processes.
So, how do I arrive at my finish compositions and what tools and what methods do I employ? In brief: I use various ratios of planned magnitude, which is a fancy way of saying that I loosely place the various compositional elements within the context of the picture plane using the golden section and the rule of thirds.
Mario Livio, the astrophysicist in his book The Story of PHI (pronounced FEE) has referred to PHI as the world's most astonishing number. Quite a distinction! What makes this numbers so interesting and intriguing is that the number PHI provides us with a wonderful example of that feeling of utter amazement- that Albert Einstein valued. In Einstein's own words regarding the number PHI, he said: “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder; no longer feel amazement is as good as dead; I snuffed out candle”.
PHI is a ratio that occurs in nature and nature has mysteriously selected this ratio as a tool of inventing itself. We are all intuitively familiar with this ratio; every time we look into one's eyes, we are affirming the number PHI, if we know what or not.
It is more often referred to as the Golden section or the divine proportion as Leonardo da Vinci referred to it as. It is a specific ratio of 1:1.618 and mysteriously nature has chosen the ratio of 1:1.618 as a means of regenerating itself. The number PHI is a never ending never repeating number of 1.6180339887…ad infinitum.
In the early 1990's a group of mathematicians on the supercomputer decided to carry out the decimal place as far as possible to determine if the number repeats or has a pattern. They abandoned the challenge after 1 billion decimal places.
Such never ending numbers have intrigued mankind since antiquity, so
I use the golden ratio as a means of compositional derivation, as it points me in the direction of a better painting.
~Arturo Chávez~