3-D Geometry
For my first project, I worked on designing a 3 dimensional geometry. In many cases in art, you see what is there in front of you, but i was trying to build something that the appreciation comes from what is missing. The inspiration for this project came after we visited the museum in New York. There were countless items that had beautiful geometric patterns on them. Each of these geometric patterns was perfectly sketch, or at least good enough that I thought they were perfect. The fact that artists were able to paint with such precision and accuracy astounded me, and I wanted to try and catch at least a small glimpse of how difficult it is to originally come up with an idea, then actually draw the plan out. I didn’t explore the art of actually making the design, which I can only imagine would be painstaking and excruciatingly slow in cases like the columns at the New York museum.
The design itself derived from inspiration in two places. First, we used a similar 2-dimensional design on the floor of our mosque. Secondly, in the museum itself, a portion of one of the screens I saw had this shape to it. Instead of using it as a shape to extrude, though, I decided to use the shape as a mold for an indent.
One of the things I loved about this design was the initial confusion when you look at just the first and last images. With just these two images, it seems like the design is coming out at you, rather than going into the material. Only with the second angle can you see the correction to this illusion. On the first pattern, though, with closer inspection, we see that it is impossible for the pattern to be extruding from the base. The bottom part of the pattern is showing, but we know that we are looking from the top down because of the top of the base. This means that what we think we are seeing cannot be the case.
It was fun designing this patterned geometry. I played with a whole bunch of different ideas using SolidWorks, a program designed for making 3D parts for engineering. It was frustrating, though, because I didn’t know how to remove a body from a larger body using an existing geometry. Though I’m sure people from centuries past didn’t have this exact problem, I can imagine that they faced awfully difficult situations hindering their progress. Knowing just how hard it was for me to design this with all the tools at hand gives me a much greater appreciation for their artwork, especially in pieces such as stone where no mistake can possibly be made.
I also had some other cool designs that I made during trial and error making this design. These images will be shown below once I get access to the computer I used to develop the patterns.