Christopher Jagers

Saturday, April 22, 2006

A Geometry of Nature

untitled | ink, gesso, screenprint on paper | 30″ x 22″
I am posting this recent drawing to suppliment a passage I just read in James Gleick’s old book, “Chaos: Making a New Science.” I love popular science, and probably read Scientific American more than Art Forum. Here is a passage that made me swoon:

Clouds are not spheres … lightning does not travel in straight lines. The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, the pocked, and broken up, the twisted, the tangled, and intertwined … the pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing.

Mmm, lovely. I want my drawings to refect that part of nature. Of course my personal interest in this complexity stands in sharp contrast to what I emphasize as a teacher, “look at how that form is essentially a cube with the corner shaved off.” If a student can’t see a hidden cube, they certainly won’t be able to recognize aperiodic patterns. So, one thing at time.

posted by chrisjag at 09:00am