Sunday, 31 January 2010
The Production of beauty - is it mathmatical?
Nature is beautiful, so with so many different, unique shapes and patterns. Such irregular dimensions and variations theses appear too random to have any mathematical connection.
Professor Ian Stewart our mathematical says this isn't the case.
That the appearance of beauty in nature is strongly influenced by numbers and our perceptions of beauty are connected to mathematics too.
The spirals on a sunflower the seeds are arranged in spiral patterns. Count the number of seeds in each spiral and you produce numbers such as 55 in one direction and 89 in the other direction, or 34 in one direction and 55 in the other. These pairs of number are known as Fibonacci numbers. Professor Ian Stewart explains that these numbers correspond very closely with growth and design in plants.
"Those numbers are clues to the dynamic process, which is the way the plant grows" .
All of the different plants grow in a similar pattern. New parts of the plant are arranged at the tip of a shoot in a spiral pattern. If you do the maths on the spiral pattern Fibonacci numbers fall out.
Professor Ian Stewart suggests that with all the different patterns that can be found in the animal kingdom there is a kind of hidden unity.
"It's as if there is a kind of universal pattern book with a particular kind of mathematical system that generates all the patterns in the book"
Theory suggests that the stripes in animals such as Zebras or Tigers are created by waves of chemicals diffusing through the tissues of the animals at a very early stage in their development. The patterns for the adult are pretty much laid down in the embryo.
"If you study the mathematics of these waves you get the same kind of patterns of waves. If you look at waves on the ocean they arrange themselves in parallel rows just like the stripes on a tiger and mathematically there is a unity in all of these things."
Ian Stewart suggests that evolution may have played a role in our perception of beauty. People are sensitive to changes in a pattern, we are intrigued by patterns that don't quite work.(I wonder is that why the models of today are so alien looking with there lollypop heads, abnormal height and long thin limbs? just as the victorians found deformity of the natural waist pleasing, is this the same?)
As we've grown up in a world where perspective is given, it seems very odd that someone had to conceive how to portray it.
Tom Korner tells us that before the Renaissance there was no perspective in paintings. People knew that things looked different. In older paintings things in the distance looked smaller but there was no consistency.
"Leonardo Da Vinci thought you could not be an artist without being a mathematician" as does Vivieene Westwood: fashion design according to Vivieene Westwood is "almost like mathmatics" "you have a vocabulary of ideas which you have to add and subtract in order to come up with an equation for the right time" - An unfashionable life, J,Mulragh.p.11
Are there common elements in paintings that people are attracted to?
According to Ian Stewart worldwide with the exception of the Dutch everybody likes a landscape with some water and some mountains in the background, a few trees and a few animals. The belief is that this goes back to when we lived on the Savannahs and this sort of landscape was a safe place to be.
So is everythin we see as beautiful build on human instincts and that everything has a pattern. I'm still slightly confused as to why throughout history it also seems our natural instinct for body deforment and how this can be percieved as attractive, and it only seems so with women... is it then mens idea of perfection that we're trying to achieve??
Saturday, 30 January 2010
What is Beauty?
I really liked this quote because it really does seem to sum up what I'm reasurching and how complex beauty seems to be today, know one quite seems to know what it is anymore, and does this matter, is this why women never seem to feel content with themselves... we just dont know what were aiming for anymore??
Friday, 29 January 2010
Beauty in a person is confusing
Thursday, 28 January 2010
Aging is an Adventure
Quotes out of What is Beauty:
I thought these quotes were beautiful and are all about your spirit and soul and how aging shows personality and life, describing "a persons face or carrigae that illuminate how they have lived: tiny elegant lines of a story" almost making age a sign of life and god (illuminate) in ones face!
From Fashion and Erotism
I really liked these couple of paragraphs relating to the victorian era about the goddess venus and how she doesnt have a tiny corseted waist, and "how a clothed woman wanted to display her sexual attributes" and how "I hate to see a womans figure lik an hour-glass. why cant they see that proportion is the true art of beauty" and "she makes me feel sick i always think she's going to break in half"
I found these couple of paragraphs quite amusing because even in todays society women are forced to wear things that are ridiculous in the name of fashion... who decides this and why do we all conform??
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Definitions of Beauty
I found the definition of beauty very strange as it constantly refurs to women as being either ugly or beautiful, and it has down as the oppisite of beauty as being a drawback. Everything that seems to characterise beauty seems to be related to being large, i.e. magnificence, grandeur, voluptuousness and a higher power (heavenlines) and art, (artistry, picturesqueness, decorativeness)
I really found these definitions quite ironic conpared to todays society
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
David Haines Specialist Review
Drawing Exhibition Museum Bristol (194 Words)
The Myth of the Soul
At first sight Haines images appear to be nothing more than photo-realist images of the corruption of youths in today’s society, but these almost hyper-realistic drawings depict something much more sinister, with young clone like images of boys with their cold, hard nature seeming to drain all the colour out of the image, in an almost brutal way almost not letting us see the full extent of the damage. These capped and cloaked clones seem absorbed in almost fetishistic medieval torture, where their symbolised only by the branding they carry; here Haines plays with the names such as Osiris, Reebok, Classic and Nike Air, as if he’s trying to symbolise the mass consumerism and the ancient tribe like quality of purpose and idol worship. Past and present are fused together with a purposeful medieval quality with the drawings defying there digital oppressor layering meaning, attention and purpose, Haines definitely achieves what he calls a “pre-photo realism” affirming his drawings as a timeless and essential form of human expression and the brutality of the human soul.
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