Radical Impressionist: A Mathematician Paints

Notes Under Construction Recently I became aware of an interest in the study of turbulence in paintings. Googling turbulence in paintings leads to several sites with artists from Leonardi da Vinci to Van Gogh and Jackson Pollack. For example*, "a mathematical analysis of the works of Van Gogh reveals that the stormy patterns in many of his paintings are uncannily like real turbulence, as seen in swirling water or the air from a jet engine".  Some Links of Interest   Painting with Turbulence:  https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/04/01/396637276/van-goghs-turbulent-mind-captured-turbulence https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3292&context=all_theses - a master's thesis, very technical involving simulations. But it includes information about the history of the term, turbulence, in art beginning with Leonardi da Vinci: "More than five hundred years ago, Renaissance artist and engineer Leonardo da Vinci identified turbulence as a distinct n

 Turbulence Series: Hillsides Documentation of the development of a larger scale painting of Turbulent Hillsides in the High Desert of New Mexico. I have been painting a series of works titled High Desert Colors. They use the prismatic colors seen here in the high desert, perhaps pushed to emphasize the full color palette. Several paintings are currently (Dec 2020) in the Marigold Arts Gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, NM. They can also be seen on my website,  www.karenhalbert.com . The very first in the series (I: sold) was inspired by a painting by Lois Griffel in her excellent Impressionist Landscapes' book, based roughly on her Sunny Day Marsh (with the water removed). Some of the inspiration came from paintings by Erin Hanson, Open Impressionist ( https://www.erinhanson.com/ ), Her use of exaggerated color, bold mosaic of patterns and thick brushwork is very attractive to me.  Her colors are built from a limited palette of red, blue and yellow. I have experimented with such

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