I think I’ve discovered something in my use of the word ‘duality’ to Nicola Dale – I think in two’s.
It reminds me of a program I saw years ago about Buckminster Fuller, the designer/inventor of the geodesic dome and all around inventive genius entrepreneur – http://designmuseum.org/design/r-buckminster-fuller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
He saw the world in triangles. He told a story of when he was a child his class was given some toothpicks and green peas and told to build a structure that would stand. Most of the children built cubes, if they managed anything at all, but Fuller built a three dimensional triangle. It had a triangular base and he used three more toothpicks, one attached at each corner of the triangle base meeting in an apex to finish his shape. According to his story, his teachers were astonished.
The first lesson I had in art was from my grandmother. I remember drawing a picture and putting two checks in the sky for birds. My grandmother told me I should put three, ‘two over here and one there’, to balance the picture with three things, ‘the Japanese do it that way,’ she told me. I didn’t know what a Japanese was or why they balanced their pictures with three things instead of two, but I took her word for it and from then on I put three checks in my skies.
I still think in two’s though, and I find myself frequently working with two elements, or space that is divided into two. I find it really stimulating. Now that I understand more about balance and symmetry, the challenge is to un-balance those two elements, not by adding a third element as my grandmother suggested, but by sticking to the two elements like grim death and working through symmetry to find what is not balanced, what is unpredictable.
Don’t know that is has any significance whatsoever, I just found it interesting to discover as I was thinking about why I chose the word ‘duality’ in my last post. By the way, I had to chuckle at Nicola’s piece titled ‘Hell’ on her website, check it out http://nicoladale.wordpress.com/category/artworks/f-h/
