 "Photo: Emily Joynton/ Manitou Messenger")
 "Photo: Emily Joynton/ Manitou Messenger")
At first, an art exhibit based on mathematical concepts seems a bit unusual. The whole “left brain, right brain” phenomenon is sometimes interpreted to an extreme. It can be easy to classify a person as either an art person or a math person, without room for crossover.
“Art From Math, Math as Art,” the new show in Flaten Art Musuem, unites the two disciplines. In the process it displays both the orderliness of a mathematical equation and the freedom and whimsy of artwork.
One of the artists in the show, Robert Fathauer, said, “I’m fascinated by certain aspects of our world, including symmetry, chaos and infinity. The creation of art inspired by mathematics … leads to designs that I feel are an intriguing blend of complexity and beauty.”
Complex and beautiful are good words to describe the exhibit. There’s a lot going on: giant, colorful prints created by layers of one transparency after another and fractal trees whose leaves repeat themselves, getting smaller and smaller as they spiral toward infinity.
It also features a series of paintings based on the equation 13+19=32; a mixture of fabric, paper and porcelain hanging from the ceiling like a futuristic shower curtain; sketches based on algorithms; wooden sculptures that are rectangular and curved at the same time; and books with each page carefully folded to create a three-dimensional shape, to name a few.
In particular, something about the painted spheres that hang from the ceiling makes one reviewer believe she could walk into the painting more than any other two-dimensional canvas ever has.
Though the works in this exhibit are quite abstract and at first seem very different from one another, the patterns and symmetry expressed in each piece make sense and bring coherence.
Seeing mathematical concepts turned into artwork brings an entirely new appreciation for both disciplines, one that can be enjoyed by both left and right-brained people. “Art From Math, Math As Art” is, in a word often used in both fields, elegant.
One artist featured in the exhibit, Dick Termes, lectured Sept. 17 about his works in the exhibit. Termes started off the lecture with a bit of autobiography, emphasizing that he has a much stronger background in art than math.
He also stressed that art and math are more closely related than people usually think. “Math and arts have been tied together for years,” Termes said.
Termes’ artwork is called a “termesphere,” a name he trademarked. Putting his graduate degree in painting and design to good work, he painted scenes on a sphere that cover 360 degrees.
Termes expressed the value of math in his and any artist’s work, whether it is abstract or realistic. Every artist has to begin somewhere, and “math helps you get started, to get over the fear of the white canvas,” Termes said.
In Termes’ work, he uses the six-point system to get started. Before he starts a scene, he picks six equally distanced points to use as his vanishing points and then fills in his work from there. “You have to find a system and stick with it, see what happens,” he said.
Termes’ art has scenes of everything. He creates scenes displaying beautiful architecture from Italy, Belgium and Turkey, but at the same time he has some spheres that display his interpretation of very conceptual ideas.
One interesting aspect of Termes’ work is the feeling of “looking in when you’re looking out.” When one look at the spheres, you appear to be standing in the middle of the scene, looking at the surroundings as it spins.
The work of Termes and other artists will be on display until Oct. 23 in Flaten. Experience the union of two very distinct disciplines in “Art From Math, Math as Art.”
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