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11/29/2007: "In the making of FACES"

My art practice has always been based on the wonder of the abstract codification of pure thought we call mathematics. I am motivated by the aesthetics of elegant mathematics now in my art as I was as a mathematician in my past. On the other hand I nurture a skeptical viewpoint on the role mathematics play as the inevitable language of choice of science and its prevalence in our lives. My art practice lies within this dialectic - in the contradiction between my two conflicting viewpoints, adopted as the determining factor in their continuing interaction.

In FACES, I confront this dialectic. I engage with my experience of the aesthetics in high level mathematics to paint faces of women that stand prominent in my visual history in the hope to question the ideas that correlate the two and the ramifications that might emanate from any tangible success in such an endeavour.



"What is the digital equivalent of lovely, he wondered. What are the digits that encode beauty, the number-fingers that enclose, transform, transmit, decode, and somehow, in the process, fail to trap or choke the soul of it. Not because of the technology but in spite of it, beauty, that ghost, that treasure, passes undiminished through the new machines." I was consumed by Rushdie's use of the words 'lovely' and 'number fingers'. It sparked off my initial sketches and ideas on the mathematics of beauty

My art practice has always been based on the wonder of the abstract codification of pure thought we call mathematics. I am motivated by the aesthetics of elegant mathematics now in my art as I was as a mathematician in my past. On the other hand I nurture a skeptical viewpoint on the role mathematics play as the inevitable language of choice of science and its prevalence in our lives. My art practice lies within this dialectic - in the contradiction between my two conflicting viewpoints, adopted as the determining factor in their continuing interaction.

In FACES, I confront this dialectic. I engage with my experience of the aesthetics in high level mathematics to paint faces of women that stand prominent in my visual history in the hope to question the ideas that correlate the two and the ramifications that might emanate from any tangible success in such an endeavour.

When I returned to my studio, I started working on my ideas for a new series of paintings. I knew that beauty is the motivating factor for mathematics. Truth is its goals. Mathematical truths tell us something about our reality. It can tell us something about beauty. How can I garner my experience of beauty and elegance in mathematics to explaining beauty in general? How can I do this thru my paintings?

After years of agonizing over these questions and with two intervening separate series of paintings entitled 'Symbiosis' and 'source_code', I started working on ideas stemming from subjective simplicity, fractal geometry and factor analysis to paint my FACES series. The most important idea in FACES is the purest and rarefied thought in the abstraction in relation of relationships that is coded into the mathematics behind faces. These ideas are used to build powerful and compact mathematical objects which embody the beauty in both mathematics and the faces of women I have known in my life. These are then used to construct my FACES series of paintings.

I invite my audience to view my paintings through a sieve - a sieve made of mathematical objects that pack a substantial amount of information on the way we might view beauty. I invite my viewers to engage not analytically, neither synthetically, but in a way that combines both modes and feel/intuit the correspondence in the aesthetics of the combined beauty of my mathematics and the underlying beauty of my faces.

But most of all I want my audience to evaluate mathematics and its place in our lives. Is mathematics something necessary for life as "art" and not just "fact" and does its value lie in, as Polkinghorne said, as an "abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe", or is it the most self-flattering, self-aggrandizing trivia game ever invented?


My paintings are beautiful paintings of beautiful people about beauty, both physical and mathematical. The suffused beauty of my paintings takes precedence over any intellectual legitimacy that I may claim for them. And perhaps the mathematical equivalent of lovely might even act as the perfect sieve to reveal a new dimension to this supreme force of human experience affecting real and lasting transformation in us. Art and maths are but languages through which we attempt to understand that which is ineffable.


- Raj (Web: www.unprimed.com / Artblog: http://sightoracle.blogspot.com )

Replies: 16 Comments

on Tuesday, December 4th, walt said

Raj, So besides being the visual medium (the paint as you called it) for the image how does the mathematics relate?

on Monday, December 3rd, jose said

Good to feel we are in dialogue now. Your reply has been very helpful. Not that I wish to know precisely how you go about it or wish to copy the process, but as an artist I am always interested in finding out more.

on Monday, December 3rd, Raj said

Jose,

Do my paintings have qualities unique to the art of painting such as say the openness of form? Are my paintings, painterly? The FACES series of paintings use mathematics as paint and the silkscreen as the brush. My philosophy is simple: Move fast, keep going; never slow down. I apply paint according to what feels right. I break every rule of the precise art of silkscreening. Rules are bad! Lines are not used and shapes distinguish themselves by variations in color. If the finished work is not what was expected, it’s a success.

I use multiple layers of paint applied over weeks of applications to get the shapes and tones I want. I have even developed recipes and contraptions that are peculiar to the type of painting I do to eek out the forms and likenesses that I aim for. In the end,one has to sift thru many layers of paint to recognise the numbers that entirely makeup the paintings.

On the other hand I adhere to strict working rules in every step in my preparations, from the choice of the face I choose to paint, the mathematics and the construction of the screens to the final details of the paintings. I do this to build a heady contrast with the free wheeling, rule-breaking painting action that I use as my final step to ‘brush’ my mathematics onto my canvas to shape my faces. The contradictions within me become the contrasting painting methods in the construction of FACES.

on Monday, December 3rd, jose said

Forgive me for being so snappy a while ago. Intellectually I find this interesting, as a process I have to confess I personally find it somewhat distant and cold. However I do not, cannot, contest it’s validity, Rajinder, you are the artist and you seem to have found what works for you. If I have understood correctly this matrix then comes up with results which you then select and transpose onto your work. Does this process go on as you are working on the piece or is it altogether prior to the work you decide to complete? In other words, can a face you start out with become something altogether different? And as Andrew pointed out does asymmetry find its way into the final work… mathematics is rigorous in its method and results, or so I believe, but is beauty itself that rigorous and can it be captured and reproduced by mathematical process? I for one love it when flaw occurs and I discover that it works and that beauty ensues from my mistake. Does mathematics account for the possibility of flaw? Sorry to put so many questions, but I am intrigued.

on Monday, December 3rd, Rajinder said

With my FACES series of paintings, as with source_code and Symbiosis, I am not as much concerned about the use of maths as a toolbox that facilitates the making of a painting. Mathematical objects are objects of art in my paintings. The mathematical objects that I use to 'paint' my faces are matrices that use factor analysis to detect meaningful underlying dimensions to explain observed similarities or dissimilarities between the faces I investigate by moving objects around in the space defined by the requested number of dimensions and by using a minimization algorithm that evaluates different configurations with the goal of maximizing the goodness-of-fit. In other words, my matrices represent the relationships within relationships in the faces I paint. The maths behind my 'FACES' paintings is based on an approach from Information theory not unlike that introduced by Prof Juergen Schmidhuber (see www.idsia.ch/~juergen/locoface/newlocoface.html). Fractal geometry gives me the data points I needs to start developing the matrices I eventually use to construct my faces.

I am interested in the phenomena of the intellectual aesthetic experience and how it relates to artistic knowing or the epistemology behind aesthetic experience. I am hoping that my paintings will serve as a portal into a realm of abstracted mathematical poetry, a labyrinth of relationships that could act as that perfect sieve to reveal a new dimension to our understanding of beauty and what makes an experience aesthetic.

on Sunday, December 2nd, walt said

Rajinder, I see on your aa pages that the faces are made of the mathematical equations you speak of. Are there any other mathematical principles included in the making of the faces? That I would be interested in hearing about in that it would be something quite integral to the issue of beauty.

on Saturday, December 1st, Rajinder said

Chris, Andrew, Jose, Ellen, Walt..forgive me for my silence. I have just finished a big solo and I am knackered. Will join the discussion asap..I look forward to it.

on Saturday, December 1st, walt said

I agree Jose. This is one that could be worth a bit of discussion and debate. Chris has a better grasp of the mathematics than I.

But just because I don't speak math doesn't mean the aesthetic results aren't there. Sure, I think math has something to do with it...the Greeks and their careful measurements of columns thicker in the lower middle and narrower at the top so that they look taller and more elegant than they really are is a great example, or the Golden Section or Golden Mean. The idea of 3's (or any asymetrical combination)...3 objects in a still life; fore ground, middle ground, back ground; light, middle value, dark structures; triadic color combinations; mathematical progressions of value, tone or hue; geometric compositional groupings and of course a whole century of non-objective geometric abstraction proves that mathematics are inherent and somewhat accessable even on a very basic level.

I do still wish Rajinder would address the subject a little more specifically. It is very hard to get any idea when the imgages are restricted to such a small size as well. So more language would be helpful. Rijander, are you building your own digital systems or using standard photo shop style software...or are these not done digitally at all but with some other painting system. I assume systems are at work since you reference the idea of fractal systems or constructions in your blog.

Symmetry has often been the definition of beauty in many cultures. Andrew mentioned symmetry...you mention fractals...aren't fractal constructions predominantly asymmetrical? Fractal constructions have been discussed at times as a kind of anti-systemic system. Yet at their root they are simply another modular system that breed a different result than the usual manufacturing modules used in industry which tend to be rectalinear.

At anyrate, I don't want to have to use my limited mathematical ability to second guess where you are going. Can you help me here?

on Saturday, December 1st, Ellen said

As Mark said, I'm happy if the inspiration comes. The source doesn't have to be specific: ie math. Walt, I'm with you, math is only visual for me and it is visually beautiful, even if I have no idea what it means. One day I was watching a 200 year old proof on PBS. I had no idea what the mathematician was doing, but the equations, covering zillions of blackboards, looked exciting and beautiful.

on Saturday, December 1st, jose said

Pity, I thought we were in for an interesting debate this time but it seems that it’s just us usual folks, again. Not that I dislike your company fellas, but I think I’ll keep further ideas for my own blogs. There’s a new student who recently joined [OD], a brazen young chap, who seemed to know it all and kept bragging about his presence on the internet and this interesting blog he had initiated. To date I have still to see a reply to the comments I posted, or any comments posted there. I am not terribly e-savvy but I was under the impression that a blog implied the possibility of an open discussion, not only amongst visitors but with the bloggers themselves. Personally I see no interest in discussing ideas as if they were goods on a supermarket shelf with my fellow shoppers without the originator of the goods stepping forth. This blogging thing takes time and effort for it to stay meaningful; it shouldn’t be just about self-promotion or watching time fly out the window with vacuous comments. Sorry la, but for once I’m inclined to go along with Chris.

on Friday, November 30th, Mark said

One starts talking math and my mind goes blank, I yawn, eyes glaze over and..... I mean no disrespect to math or those who work in and with it, just I find it goes beyond intuitive thinking and becomes formula. Could my paintings be math influenced and I just do not know it? Maybe, I can not argue that as I honestly do not know. Yet I do not care as for me, art, creating, painting, is an intuitive act of spiritual (I am not talking religious here) joy. In all though it doesn't matter where it comes from so long as the art comes.

on Friday, November 30th, walt said

This may be an interesting idea. Yet I found it hard to decipher. Like Jose and Ellen, math was always a confusing issue for me. The only math class I ever did well in was geometry because it is inherently visual. I think visual thinkers intuit the math without realizing it consciously. I remember one professor telling me that painting is like juggling, juggling one ball is easy. Two balls is not really juggling at all. You're not really juggling until you have at least three balls with one or two in the air and the other in your hand all at the same time. Painting, he said, requires an infinite number of balls.

I am aware for instance of how I measure space...it's a binary process in that one item is bigger/closer than another which is smaller/further, one left and one right, one is lighter than this one, one is one color and the other another color. These contrasts pile up until a sense of space is established.

I am sensitive to symetries as Andrew mentioned.

I am sensitive to flat space as well in that I notice every distinction between two shapes, the shape itself and its difference turnings, the measurement of the space between (left, right up and down)subtle differences in size and directional energy, mathematical shifts in tone, chromatic intensity, hue, the density of a texture...these can be considered mathmatical yet I don't think them so much as I see them. The only meaning, the only importance the math holds for me is how it looks.

I know the mathematical patterns are there. But I don't have to know how my engine works to turn the key and drive my car. But maybe, for the right mind, there is a mathematical meaning that can be apprehended. Can you talk about that? Can you explain how it is derived from or planned in your work? And here's the kicker...can you put it in terms a layman will comprehend?

on Friday, November 30th, Ellen said

I think that math is the key to the universe, but I am sadly lacking in this area. I do believe that, as Andrew said, the painting of body begins with symetry and then becomes alive through alteration of that perfection. If an artwork is "overly calculated" it seems false. Don't all artists seek the truth (whatever that means to each one) in their work? Therefore, I'd like to offer a spin on Jose's question: Rajinder, do you lay down a mathematical basis and then distort it to create beauty in painting? Or do you use math and art as separate entities that join or wrap around each other to complete a painting?

on Friday, November 30th, jose said

Yours is an interesting quest, Rajinder. Even though my proficiency in things mathematical is somewhat lacking, I have always sensed that art and maths are partners in a dance that goes on all around us. To be able to use the two and better reveal the ‘whirling of the dervish’, so to speak, must be a grand treat indeed. Tell me, do you allow accident and miscalculation to enter the final work, do you sometimes feel that you have ‘fail[ed] to trap or choke the soul of it’ as in Rushdie’s quote, and yet allow it to become fixed in the painting at hand?

on Friday, November 30th, Andrew said

I am struck by the fact that in figurative work, the artist has to deal with symetry. The body has two halves, which are almost mirror images of one another. Yet, if we portray them that way, with out introducing some degree of asymetry, our figures are lifeless, frozen. We start with symetry, and then twist it, bend it, change our point of perspective, to turn it into something else. Asymetry introduces motion, and motion is life. There is in this a parallel to your discussion about mathematics and art. It might be that they are not really two different languages, but different parts of the same language.

on Thursday, November 29th, Chris Mohler said

I wish we all had the luck of having a "wonderful agent".