Art and Physics

The great artist Paul Gauguin once said, "Painting is the most beautiful of all arts" everyone can create a story at the will of his imagination and with a single glance have his soul invaded by the most profound recollections." Just as the English language has symbols such as letters to communicate with the reader, paintings have symbols which when viewed; create a story that communicates to the viewer, such as reading a book. In this case, both the writer and the painter have views in their head that they wish to communicate with the reader or viewer, and both have specific techniques in doing this. It is said that a picture holds a million words, and as a writer using sentences that are made up of letter symbols, a painter uses objects to convey the message they wish to tell. The increased knowledge in the field of physics has revolutionized how art is portrayed and crafted, through different techniques and advancements, artists can communicate to the viewer not through just art, but science and mathematics as well.

Tensegrity, a massive five hundred pound sculpture spanning nine feet in diameter, hangs like a chandelier in the atrium of UW-Madison Engineering Center Building. This sculpture, displayed in Figure 1, was crafted by R Buckminster Fuller and is based on the art of physics with the help from the fields of physics and mathematics. This immense sculpture is made of sixty stainless steel tubes and uses an architectural system which stabilizes these steel tubes by balancing forces of compression and tension. Fuller invented a method called Tensegrity, a tensional integrity system. The general principle is that tensions and compression always and only coexist. There is no way to have tensions with out compressions being there. So through the use of steel wired cables, this system is able to have continuous tension discontinuous compression structure (Urner, 2001) "The word 'tensegrity' is an invention: a contraction of 'tensional integrity.' Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors," stated by Fuller, the creator and inventor of Tensegrity (Obscure, 2001) This structure uses the Physics of compression and tension of steel wired cables to display sixty steel tubes which advance outwards from the axis to create a spherical sculpture. The use of the Physics of tensional integrity greatly enhances the overall appearance of Tensegrity and adds a hidden element that increases the unknown beauty of this sculpture due to addition of physics into this masterpiece.

During the Renaissance Era, painters such as Leonardo Da Vinci were using a technique described as the Divine Proportion. The pen and ink drawing, The Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo Da Vinci depicts a man that is circumscribed inside a circle and a square with his arms and legs fitting inside the circumference of the circle. At first glance, this is a drawing of a long haired naked man, but one must look deeper to reveal the true secrets of this masterpiece displayed in Figure 2. Vitruvius, a Roman architect stated that buildings should be based on the proportions of man, since the human body is a model of perfection. Vitruvius verifies this by stating that when a humans arms and legs are extended, the fit into two perfect geometric shapes, the circle and the square. Leonardo Da Vinci built upon what Vitruvius started and created The Vitruvian Man, and in doing so, created what is known as the Divine Proportion.

Renaissance artists used a system called the Divine Proportion which is based off the number phi, and used it for beauty and balance in the design of art. Da Vinci used this number defined by phi, which is an infinite non-repeating decimal, not to be confused with PI, and is approximately equal to 1.618 and is considered the most beautiful number in the universe. Phi is derived from the Fibonacci sequence, and acts as a natural building block of nature. Plants, animals and humans possess dimensional properties which correspond to the ration of Phi to 1. In a honeybee community, the females always outnumber the males, and when dividing the number of female bees to the number of male bees, the number always comes out to be Phi or 1.618. The ratio of each spiral to the next in a chambered Nautilus shell is 1.618 to 1.

This divine proportion number was used extensively in Leonardo Da Vinci's work the The Vitruvian Man. He realized different ratios of human body parts are equal to the number Phi. Da Vinci concluded that the height of a human divided by the distance from your belly button on the floor is equal to the number phi, 1.618. The distance from a humans shoulder to their finger tips, divided by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips will give you the number phi, and much more.

By the discovery of the number Phi, ancient discovered Gods building block for the world, and they worshipped Nature because of that. And by Da Vinci's discovery of this Divine Proportion, artwork has forever been changed by artists such as Michelangelo, Albrecht Durer, and many others trying to strictly adhere to the Divine Proportion in the layout of The Vitruvian Man. This artwork not only displays artistic ability, but includes within it one of the greatest mathematical discovers art has ever encountered. In the collage named Light Rain, crafted by Rudie Berkhout, hangs in the UW-Madison Engineering Hall, is based on the use of holographic material that displays colors from the visible light spectrum when reflected off light. Light Rain consists of eight square holographic portraits that are aligned on the wall with different anglers so when one walks past this portrait the visible wavelengths create a moving rainbow effect.

Without the use of physics, this structure would not be possible to make since the holographic mirror needs to aligned so the visible light waves will reflect with a light is shined on them. And since the holographic squares are aligned on different angles, different holographic shapes are created in the eight different squares. Either in a painting, a sculpture or a collage, the mathematics and physics is used to enhance the quality of the artwork and adds elements of art that augment the appearance and the structural complexities of the design. With out the additional field of mathematics and physics, Tensegrity, The Vitruvian Man, and Light Rain would not have been able to be constructed since the fields of physics and mathematics need to be calculated in order for each different aspect in the three different pieces to work correctly.

References

Urner K, (2001). The R. Buckminster Ruller FAQ: other inventions Retrieved from http://www.cjfearnley.com/fuller-faq-5.html

Obscure, J. (March, 2001). Jazz, all about jazz. Retrieved from.. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/threads/jc-listen.htm

The board of regents of the University of Wisconsin System. (2001, May. 21). Light rain. [graphic]. Retrieved December 10, 2004, from http://www.engr.wisc.edu/server/welcome/artofengineering/hologram.html

The board of regents of the University of Wisconsin System. (2002, Aug. 6). Tensegrity. [graphic]. Retrieved December 10, 2004, from http://www.engr.wisc.edu/graphics/photos/campus-scenes/TENSEGRI.jpg

Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci Code. New York.

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