The Golden Ratio

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The Golden Ratio PowerPoint Presentation

This is a link to a PowerPoint presentation about the Golden Ratio, Golden Rectangles and the Golden Spiral in math, nature, science and art. The mystery of phi and the associated mathematical sequence of the Fibonacci numbers are so powerful as to have led our ancient ancestors to call it Divine. It certainly seems to be the underlying order to the apparent chaos of nature. I gave this lecture to the North Tampa Arts League on September 24, 2014. Several years earlier I wrote an article about it for my art and photography students which you can read here http://classesbygainor.com/design.pdf. Since then I did a great deal of new research and found a wealth of information and really good websites on the subject, as well as obtaining the DVD lectures from The Great Courses The Joy of Thinking: The Beauty and Power of Classical Mathematical Ideas. Some of the new information is quite interesting, and different from my earlier article, where the Chambered Nautilus Shells is the famous emblem of the Golden Spiral and the Fibonacci numbers in nature, turns out not to be a Golden Spiral after all, but a kind of inverted one instead. 

Do not be alarmed by the math aspect of all this. I have a famous history of being totally mathematically challenged, from first grade when we were asked to look at our booklets in which there were cartoon illustrations of math problems. "There are three monkeys in a tree. One fell out, so how many are left?" My hand went up. "What happened to the monkey?" I asked my not amused teacher. And from that point on my association with mathematics went south! But I do have a kind of morbid fascination with all this, although I can't understand the equations that solve the riddle of Phi, but I can appreciate the wonder of it all without knowing a scrap of algebra! 

And, as an artist, I can certainly understand how the power of the Golden Rectangle has been used in art, industrial design, and architecture through the centuries. I certainly understand how the Golden Rectangle is featured in my own artwork!

Incidentally, if you do go to authorstream.com to look at the slides you need to advance them manually and it is a bit difficult to see how to do this if you are in full screen view. Put your mouse in the lower right corner and a little arrow appears. Click and you go to the next slide.

Map to HCC Gourmet Room for My Show

The Campus is located on Tampa Bay Blvd. which is just south of Raymond James Stadium on Dale Mabry Hwy. Turn west into Tampa Bay Blvd. and the campus will be on your right. Park in the General Parking Lot. The Gourmet Room is located in the Humanities Building, Room 118. See the circle on the map. If you can't find it, ask someone.

Awe Update

Remember? This was on July 14 When my dear friend's mop handle went through Awe

I picked up the painting this afternoon (my birthday!) and the restoration is amazing

Here is a detail of the tear on the front. I plan to paint a bud and leaf over it so it will be practically invisible. It is a beautiful repair

This is the back of the painting showing the tear. I don't really mind that it shows on the back. 

After this happened I decided to repaint the whole thing from scratch and ordered the stretchers and canvas for a redo. After seeing the photographs the restorer sent me I thought it would be a good idea to wait to see it finished. Now I just have some finishing to do on a few areas of the lower part of the painting and add something over the tear and price the painting for less than the original amount, and be done with it.

I am indebted to Anna Granina who lives in Land O Lakes, Florida, and is a fantastic art restorer who worked for many years for the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Additionally she is a very accomplished artist and I met her at one of the shows I curated at Carrollwood Cultural Center. 

Art Show

I will have a show of my Genesis Series paintings, and some other fruit and vegetable offerings, in this delightful dining room which is actually a laboratory for the students in the restaurant and hospitality department of the Hillsborough Community College. When I met with the staff the other day, the chefs were getting excited about what kind of food coordination they could create to go with my paintings for the opening reception.
The room is small and so they ask that reservations be made. The show will be on display until December 5th and lunches and dinners are served 3 days a week (check website for the schedule of international cuisine offerings), the price is fantastic and I will probably be going there for lunches and dinners though that time period. Want to meet me there?

The Perfect Picture

Oil on Linen     18 x 24     Private Collection (sold 9-6-14!)

You might ask "why so cheap?" This is quite a big discount for one of Gainor's paintings!

I did this painting on speculation after someone inquired about the previous painting of the same setting called "The Cranes of Carrollwood" which was both already sold and too expensive for their budget. I wanted to practice stretching canvas and used my new air compressor and pneumatic staple gun and the result is frightening mess and the corners are worse...each one folded differently and not professionally at all...thus the deep discount for messy stretching. But the painting is quite nice and has those same Sandhill Cranes and a lady from my Digital Photography class is snapping their picture. For those of you who don't know me the silver Scion is my car traveling along the street in both paintings! Now I want you to know that I have some skill at photo editing and I was not driving my car AND making this painting at the same time! Nor were the cranes and the lady in that exact location at the exact same time, although both of them were in the park at some time over the past 4 years when I go out there with my Digital Photography students to hunt down interesting photographs. Sometimes I'm grateful that I have a need to clutter up my hard drive with hundreds of photos of the same thing, over and over, and I have a wealth of images to get exactly the right lighting although the lady in the red shirt had to be moved and flipped so she would make the composition of the painting work. 

Genesis: Tangerine

Genesis: Tangerine      Egg Tempera       6 x 8     $450

I am still painting them! All together this one makes 34 Genesis paintings finished with 12 of them sold. Two are in the wings and I hope to have them finished by the end of September when I have been asked to have a show of them at Hillsborough Community College in their gourmet cafe. 

The Cranes of Carrollwood

Oil on Canvas        22 x 30      Private Collection

The serene park behind the Carrollwood Cultural Center buzzes from time to time with vendors during our Arts in the Park, and during the Market on the 2nd Saturday of the month. It is always a place of variety and interest during these events, but my main interest in this lovely setting is during my digital photography class when I take my students out to photograph whatever they can find here. I have made hundreds of photographs of this place, usually in the late afternoon when the light is casting long shadows and the trees are dark against the setting sun.

There are always things of interest; birds, bugs, lizards, and passing people on foot, on bikes and in cars. I wanted to capture the serenity of the place, as well as the wandering Sandhill Cranes who seemed totally oblivious of us shooting our cameras madly at them.

This was an especially nice painting for me to do, as it is always nice to work a landscape, and it was particularly nice to associate my painting with a job that has been a wonderful experience for me, as the Art Curator of the Carrollwood Art Gallery. I’m moving on, to give myself more time for my artwork, and I feel that this is a symbolic painting as I retire from one thing and move into another. All that green and blue seems so peaceful and quiet, with just a glimmer of exciting red here and there. Life is like that, I think. Or, if it isn’t, it should be!

Anniversary Flowers

Anniversary Flowers    
Oil        18 x 24      $425 (framed) 

I celebrated 41 years of sobriety in April of this year (2014) and my beloved meeting gave me these flowers, which were bigger and more impressive than what Vivian gets for the other celebrants who get a few carnations and a couple of sprigs of baby's breath and a few ferns. I was very pleased to be so honored! Then, about the same time, the Les Girls group gave me the cream and sugar bowl as a thank you for giving them a Show at CCC. I provided the Petits Four for myself and couldn't resist taking a bite out of one of them as I was arranging it on the plate! I don't often, if ever, do a black background, which will have to be finished with retouch varnish to even out the shiny and matte sections. Actually the background is not black but a combination of ultramarine, viridian, and alizarin crimson. 

Luscious Fruit

Luscious Fruit         9 x 12       Oil        $145.00 

This little canvas was a last minute throw-together when I realized I forgot to bring my work-in-progress canvases to my Tuesday night class. I raced over to our neighborhood Publix Supermarket and grabbed what looked inviting and this little still life is the result. I didn't work on it very long, perhaps 2 or 3 sessions, and wanted it to be kind of loose. 

Awe Disaster

I spent all day last Wednesday repainting the sky....again! For cripes sake. I learned how to take out brush marks, thanks to the internet by "flogging" my painting with a soft dry brush and finally after days of drying time, this morning I decided I could live with the result. I had also repainted the flowers and felt that I only needed one more session to pull the painting together and call it finished. Today my friend came to help me clean my house and she was mopping the floor behind my easel and the painting fell, and hit something, we don't know what, because I was in my office on the phone and didn't see the resulting disaster. I am still feeling sick to my stomach about this. Obviously it ended the major cleanup of my house and I got on the phone immediately to a lady I met a few months ago who is a fine art restorer. I will take the painting to her this afternoon to assess the damage. Hopefully it can be repaired. If not I will have to repaint the painting...2 years gone in one instant. I am really devastated right now, and feel really awful, and my friend is beside herself as well. So there is more to come on this painting, which has been a total hassle from the start. It just can't end like this!!

This is the tear.

Stars and Stripes Finished

Stars and Stripes      Oil on Canvas     18 x 24      $400

This painting was done for our July/August show at Carrollwood Cultural Center, which is called "Celebrate America" with a widespread assortment of themes and images possible. This is my entry. 

WIP (work in progress)

Stars and Stripes     Oil on Canvas       18 x 24

Our July/August show at Carrollwood Cultural Center is called "Celebrate America" and I really wanted to get something to show for myself. As usual I tried to make something way more complicated than what you see here, and my ideas had to be scrapped due to time limits and energy levels. I was going to make my own fabric drapery using images I've taken across America, cropped into large star shapes, and applied to fabric using the transfer and iron method. It could have been interesting, but when I thought about all that difficult perspective and folds and weird images, I realized I might have it done by Christmas! So...the edited version is what you see here and I need to have it finished and dry enough to hang by the 30th of this month. I'm about to spend the rest of today working on it, also another day tomorrow, and hopefully Sunday as well, and then I think it will be close to finished. The canvas is one of those deep gallery wraps so I don't have to worry about a frame for it.

**WTF**????

When I overpainted the last mess with pure cobalt blue (Winsor and Newton) the wet paint looked fabulous and as it dried this is what I got. It is still slightly wet in a few spots, and so I'm back to wonderment with what is happening here. It is better than the last time, so I guess the next step is to cover it again with pure cobalt out of the tube and keep trying until it dries a solid color without the mottling. I can only say that in my 55 years of painting I've never experienced anything like this before and I am so frustrated. I'll let it dry another few days and see what happens next.

Two New Nude Monotypes

 Monotype Nude #1     14 x 20    POR

Monotype Nude #2   14 x 20      POR

I had a nice day with my friend Marcia who wanted to work on some more monotypes with me. She has done this before, coming out from Tampa to work in my studio, since I am now unwilling to schlep all my gear into Carrollwood Cultural Center for a one day Monotype Workshop which was a killer the last few times I've done it. So it is my studio or nothing from now on. When Marcia comes it gives me a day to get some of my own monotypes created. These are two nude studies I did that day using models I get from www.posespace.com, a nifty way to get wonderful models for not much money, who don't move and are never cranky or hung over, at least that I know about! At least I know they are going to show up...a common problem with live models, many of whom are not really very professional.

Monotypes are basically a print of a painting, created on a nonabsorbent surface (I use Plexiglas or acrylic panels) with inks, or almost any kind of paint. I am not overly enthused by my efforts to make watercolor monotypes, but they are possible. Acrylics are also possible, but I don't like to use them. Normally my best monotypes are made with oil paint on wet etching paper, Rives BFK papers, although I think these two were printed on Stonehenge printmaking papers, wet. I don't have a press so they were printed with my handheld press and a spoon.

Before I moved to Florida I did many monotypes. Back then I did some very exciting experiments in monotype and was constantly inspired by the work of colleagues in the Monotype Guild of New England. How I miss those days! I love doing monotypes because it keeps me spontaneous and loose. You can't get fussy with a monotype or the paint will dry and you get spots of white where nothing prints. Paint can be dry in a matter of hours, especially in our air-conditioned work spaces in Florida.

I suspect this, along with another monotype nude I made awhile ago, (here) is the beginning of a series of nudes using various models in PoseSpace.

I am definitely freaked out!!!

What is going on here? I am so puzzled...not puzzled isn't the right word at all...freaked, confused, confounded and disheartened. So...what to do next? I guess I'll just ladle on more paint and see what happens. I thought this miserable painting was done, or nearly done. Unfortunately it isn't. Oh my...this is a bad dream.