The Mathematics of Painting - Introduction






What does Mathematics have to do with Art? There's no connection. Right!?? But isn't Mathematics all around us in the environment?  I would say that the answer is a resounding "YES!". Mathematics underlies the patterns found everywhere in nature and this influences our paintings.

A funny thing happened while becoming an artist and landscape oil painter (after my first careers as a Mathematician and Computer Programmer). I noticed how often the 'bibles' of painting included chapters on design and what I perceived as mathematical elements: aerial perspective, dimensionality, proportions, unequal measures, patterns and motif, self-similarity, informal sub-division, symmetry, dynamic symmetry, the golden mean, etc..  Then terms like fractals, Mandelbrot, self-similarity and fibonacci series began to crop up everywhere.

Almost 20 years after beginning my painting journey I realize that it has brought me full-circle back to my roots in mathematics. And my paintings are developing further as I embrace this essential part of my life.  I now actively seek mathematical patterns for my art. After all,  landscape painting is based on what we see around us and mathematics underlies all of nature.

What is radical impressionism: it's my attempt to marry Mathematics and Painting and so we now have, Radical Impressionist: A Mathematician Paints. The use of "Radical" is intentional: in my studies of designs I have discovered more than the Golden Ratio as a pleasing proportion of height vs width for paintings. Historically, artists have used other ratios involving the mathematical term, radical; eg, square root of two and others. There's a fascinating link between these radicals and the golden mean limit. I will add an article with references devoted to this topic (soon).

Topics to be Covered in this Blog

(Edit: Aug 2020. I mean to write a chapter on each topic here, with painting illustrations. Perhaps I will yet get around to it…)
  1. Compositions:
  2. Patterns in Nature:
  3. Turbulence:
  4. Aerial Perspective:
  5. Golden rectangle:
  6. Informal division:
  7. Dynamic symmetry:
  8. Fractals and chaos:
This introduction was originally published in 2019 but changed enough to warrant a new date.

Search for labels related to these topics.  A new post of interest might be (long): Turbulence

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