Booth 412
(See map below)
About the Artist
When I set out to make my form of mathematical art, I had several goals in mind: First, I wanted to demonstrate that mathematical systems, properly crafted, could produce a much richer set of artistic images than the hyper-geometric, fractally generated images that typically characterize mathematical art. A crucial element of this first goal was to create textures and abstractions that are as “painterly” as possible. A second goal was to explore as wide a range of mathematical systems as I could. Essentially, I am looking for esthetic capability in a very wide range of linked mathematical equation sets including forms from all of the elementary functions, power functions, differential difference and integral equations, regression, and logical branching. I use a higher dimensional space that freely mixes color and space variables. A third goal was the hybridization of real world images that are seemingly incompatible, e.g. flowers and printers, Dutch windmills and people, cafes and vases of silk flowers. Because the hybridization is part of the complex transformation process it often produces startlingly unexpected results. Finally, I had an overarching goal of producing images that are compellingly beautiful while simultaneously exploring the limits of beauty as they relate to mathematically generated hybridizations and transformations. This last goal flows naturally from my love of both gardening and math. We know that many of the most precious things in our lives are the gifts of beauty bestowed by the natural world, e.g., flowers, trees, butterflies and birds. I try to explore the limits of that innate beauty using mathematics as my brushes and photographs as my paint. In addition, I am also anxious to explore the role of beauty in the mathematical transformation of synthetic objects, and, like Picasso in his cubist phase, in the mathematically driven melding of synthetic and organic images. As I delved into the creation of this painting system, gradually increasing the complexity of my equation sets, I began to see a connection between my approach and the idea that hidden in the structure of the world is a virtual infinity of unimagined forms. The mathematical transformations seemed to me to be particularly effective at peeling back the layers of the mundane to reveal fascinating properties of the real world images captured by the raw focus of the camera. To me this symbolizes the power of science (my other profession is biophysics) to show unexpected hidden aspects of the physical world. It also emphasizes the more esoteric, I would say religious or spiritual, idea that virtually all the totality of existence is beneath the surface of perception and art is one of the best ways to capture a bit of that hidden universe in tangible form. Two particular examples of this are Carnival Dumbell and A Dream of Beautiful Industry-both created from the same photo of a gray antique windmill in the Netherlands.
Based in Chevy Chase, MD.
