3 thoughts on “Sacred Geometry”

1. Love it!

   I may even have to sit down with some cardboard and my compass, this weekend.
   (It has been way too long)

   My beyond alternative (no classes, no curriculum) education featured the five regular solids (only five possible shapes with faces of equal sides) very highly.

   Tetrehedron (pyramid) Hexahedron (cube) octohedron (two four sided pyramids, base to base) dodecahedron (very weird, for being pentagonally faced – but so much fun to build in cardboard!) and the lovely icosahedron (simplest geodesic)

   I suspect our demented headmaster was a pupid (or fan) of Coxeter – who was one ot the world’s great classical geometers (at our U of T) and a good friend of both Buckminster Fuller and Escher. Funny angle – to be a geometer then, was to be a radical throwback, in an age of French-boolean ascendancy in math (very much like being a representative painter in the radical sixties).

   But the compass has turned again – by the nineties, geometry had re-asserted its extraordinary value – as computers began to proliferate and get tasked ever widerl

   To me – it is the fundamental link between reasoning math (got to LOVE Euclid) and the world of engineering and creating things of sustained human value.

   Mind you, I’m kind of nuts!

   Hope all is well, and the studio is being generous with you (family too).
   Miss ya!
   ¯_(ツ)_/¯

   Reply

   • Hi Paul! Lovely to hear from you. Yeah, these more classical principles tend to wax and wane in the curriculum, but I’ve always found them fascinating. I was attempting to explain, in the simplest manner I could muster, the principle of the Golden Ratio to one of my classes last night. They looked like their heads were about to explode.

     I miss our chats. I haven’t taught drawing since the “before times” (pre-pandemic). Do you still model at the school?

     Reply

     • Hey Jennifer

       Zero response to the concept of “golden section” sadly unsurprising. Ten ways into this (from latchkey DIY resourcefulness – adjacent to unstoppability – to Neitzschean struggle as the basis of all strength), but I still like the simple version I worked out, while thinking about art-teaching (from the model stand, natch).

       You have to have had (or at least thought about) a problem, in order to respond to a big beautiful idea which might solve and/or integrate many. This is the simplest reason that you have to draw (or play your instrument, or write) a lot, so that you encounter a TON of problems you can’t solve, and get your mind ready for learning (which then gets you good enough to encounter a whole new level of problems – and so on, ad infinitum)

       More abstractly, philosophical keys only appeal to those who philosophize – and for GenX – the last free range generation, we had every kind of adversity at once (except lack of spirit) in a generally non-fatal dose – and so got rather interesting as we negotiated our way toward progress – unending brick walls, notwithstanding!

       I haven’t been on the model stand since just before Covid, when I brought my wife home from the hospital (still can’t believe the fortune of that timing), and changed my official shingle from “Model” to “Caregiver”. Miss the work a lot (and our always stimulating conversations), but it’s nice to be a nest-maker also (finally able to write as I want, without ever feeling guilty that it isn’t aimed at earning money!)

       Catherine is being stoic/heroic – not only keeping up her spirits, despite being “on a leash” as she jokes (oxygen machine) she’s even found a new hobby – diamond painting – which lets her get into needlepoint/painting flow-state, without any fumes or bothering her arthritis – she’s even made several large (basically small-tile mosaics) from my photographs – kind of an in house art collaboration – way fun.

       I still remember your “long game” detachment from the cut-and-thrust of daily madness (and admire that, as another form of practical stoicism) but should you find “the daily pravda” driving you batty, you might get a kick from my very independent and post-tribalist (anti-war, most of all) take on things (link below).

       Cheers, Jennifer – keep representing the funky torque (needed, more than ever)
       ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

       https://paulsnyders.substack.com/