Sunday, January 27, 2008

Kites

For those of you who have read "The DaVinci Code" this acrylic painting is based on the Fibonacci series.
What appears to be a casual painting of kites is an extremely complex mathematical representation.

Leonardo Fibonacci, or Leonardo of Pisa (1170?-1240?), was an Italian mathematician who established a series of numbers such that each successive number was the sum of the previous two. The series is: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21…(nx+nx+1)…

The ratio of adjacent Fibonacci Numbers approaches the number 1.618 as the numbers approach infinity. This number has some very interesting characteristics and has been designated with the Greek letter F, phi. The number is as important in nature as the letter P, pi, is in physics.
The four kites near the center each lie at one of these ‘Golden Points’. Four kites lie at one half that distance from the edges and two lie at one quarter of that distance. The ‘reference’, or starting kite is the red kite in the upper left corner.
Each kite’s length follows the mathematical formula of 1.2X FXL, starting with X=0 where F=1.618, phi, the ‘Golden Number’ and ‘L’ is the ‘unit length’.
Regarding the number of kites. Consideration was given to the ‘magical’ numbers of 7 and 13. Seven would have implied ‘good luck’ while thirteen would have implied ‘bad luck’ so the number of kites was chosen midway between, or 10, implying ‘no luck’ but total intent.
To have used 7 kites would have eliminated the three largest which would have made the painting weak with too much open space. To have chosen 13 kites would not have allowed all the kites to be seen because there would have been three larger kites which would have overlapped and obscured the smaller kites.
As each kite’s length increased, the proportion of width to length (aspect ratio) was made decreasingly smaller so that the longer the kite, the narrower it became.
Each kite’s tail is equal to the length of the kite and is painted in the complementary color of the kite.
The string that tethers each kite is influenced by gravity so that it hangs in an arc, a ‘catenary’, descending from the attachment point of the kite to the ground and becomes progressively straighter as it nears the ground. All the kite strings would appear to be parallel to an observer on the ground but the kites are being viewed from an altitude close to the largest kites.

Being a physicist, how could I not paint this?

1 Comments:

At 9:24 PM, Blogger José Sinclair said...

Beautiful! whimsical, airy.. love this for some reason, it's a feeling I think! -- Jose

 

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