The other 2 courses were Communication/Speech and Crafts. Big Creativity provided by Crafts (of course) and Math. Speech provided opportunities for introspection and working with classmates all of whom were young enough to be my kids. Well, not all at the same time, of course, hee, hee.
For the next couple posts, I'll share pics of Craft projects. For now, here is a pic of my final Math project currently displayed on top of a bookcase.
Our assignment, in lieu of a final exam, was to take something we are interested in and find out how math is involved and then to share it with the class. I chose art because when I was young I wanted to be an "artist named Ramona." I don't remember why the name Ramona... Anyway, I didn't have any traditional artistic talent, couldn't draw, paint or sculpt (Play-doh lumps anyone?) I did like crafts like making purses out of random boxes.
As an adult I've done some collage but often don't know where to start or get ideas and I didn't have a lot of confidence about what I was doing. So for my Math project I decided to see if I could use Math as a basis to make an art piece. I read several Math books and looked through even more...
I settled on combining the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Ratio to make the piece. The triangles are the right triangle that's used to make a Golden Rectangle and has the special quality that 5 copies can be put together to make a larger copy and five of those can be put together the same way and so on and on. (Any old triangle can be made into a larger copy by putting together 4 copies of the original)
Put together enough (1250) little Golden Right Triangles and you get a Pinwheel Tiling
I used a picture of the tiling to find the "super" triangles and enlarged 2 on graph paper, transferred that to plain paper and Darling Man made 50 copies on watercolor paper for me to cut, arrange like a giant jigsaw puzzle and paint. (May I just say watercolor pencils are a great invention) I used taped together graph paper (89 X 144 squares, a Golden Rectangle drawn using the Fibonacci Sequence) as the base with the triangles in the center and black cardstock around the border. The frame was found in the clown closet in the basement but we haven't talked about that yet!
I loved how it turned out and that it's really big (24 x 36) I think it's neat that I put it together and painted it vertically but like it better displayed horizontally.
Here's a closer pic so you can see the triangles a little better
There's a cool thing to do with pentagons, too...
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