Another Look At an El Greco Painting and his Metaphysical Proportioning of its Canvas

In every painting I've investigated by the artist, El Greco, a 16th century Spanish painter I've found these hidden grids determining the proportions of his canvases. Seems that this grid making was this extra step he took. No other artist did this. Not to my knowledge. In my readings about El Greco I've found no scholars taking notice of what I've found. I used reproductions, tracing paper, and a straight edge when I made the first study of one of his canvases. Every single reproduction showed that the grid making was essential ordinal first step in the preparation that went into the designing of his compositions.

Proportions came first. It wasn't just one or two, but all I came across ranging across decades.


As far as I have discerned in my investigations he was the only painter to take this extra step. That is to say all European artists were using vanishing points and perspective geometry to create illusions of three dimensions, but not for the purposes El Greco had. He was harmonizing the shapes of his canvases, creating 'platonic' proportions, metaphysical proportions. He was pent on finding in geometry the most appropriate formats for representing the sacred images that his choice of subject matter required.


WIth a straight edge and a copy of a reproduction of his painting, I analyzed the given shape. I started with drawing the diagonals of the rectangle. At first glance Christ Healing the Blind and Laocoon seem very much alike. But the grid revealed the differences.

Nor did I suspect I could derive a triangle grid from the rectangle grid I started with. Nor that from the triangle grid there was also a square hidden also in the Laocoon. A recent slide show I put together illustrates the whole process, shows step-by step how one grid precedes the next. El Greco did not have a computer and the software I am now using. He did all the way Pythagorus did it.



What astonishes me, blows my mind is that I may be the only person who knows about this.

El Greco's vision of reality is existential and Platonistic. His secret use of ancient Greek geometric planar grids served an essential purpose. His was of such a mysticism in which only such a methodology enabled him to incorporate Golden Rectangles in his depictions of what he held was sublimely sacred.

This kind of alchemy he kept secret. He would never allow it to be guessed at or discovered.

It accounts not only for the proportioning of his canvases, but also for the distinctly singular and unique distortions he employed in his representations of the human figures!

Quitting And Not Thinking I'm A Quitter

There are things I've been years at doing that I'm now thinking of I ought to quit, stop doing.

I'm reminded of the time I quit smoking. It took me years to get fed up enough to give it it up. I remember the resolve took years before I finally quit smoking and stayed off the habit. I'm contemplating quitting 'making art'.




Or maybe thinking that the drawings and what-other things I make is art. This work I do and have done goes back many decades. Got very serious about it especially when I retired from teaching. I was 57 when that happened. That is, wanting to, aspiring to 'make art'.




The easy part of it was the aspiring. It was between me and myself. I could spend hours and days at drawing, painting and pretending. It didn't much matter how anyone else thought of my work. I didn't much show it, didn't much be deterred by whether I exhibited or didn't.

The high, the intoxication came in the doing... At least that for me had to suffice.





It sufficed that I found such sublimities in my examining of great works of art by artists living and dead. Moments of awe and revelation that evolved out of my own singular efforts.

I'm now thinking I might quit, walk away from my thinking and doing such things I've been doing.




To be continued.

More About My Algorithmic Drawings

I call such drawings 'algrorithmic.

I work with a felt tip pen and fill pages of my drawing books with closed loops right angled polygons. Most especiqlly pentagons .I design patterns to fill the insides and see what happens.

















The most interesting patterns I get with pentagons and right triangles.
Right triangles work with squares rectangles, triangles and also pentagons.
I avoid the edges of the page, keep the holwe thing centered, balanced. I stop when I stop. That is when it's as far as I can take it. There is no sure way or certainty about whether anyt of theseare 'finished'.













I get the nearly mess and complications andneed to resort on colors to map it, sort it. I do it with color markers' Water colors buckle the paper. There's a wide range of hues tints shades and tones in the local art stores.







Iimagine myself in space, visual space, one eyed space. And my drawing sessions are not just visual but also events. Each drawing is a performance that spans a duration of moments and happens at a place where I happen to be, and at specific location, It is existentially in a span of my 'here and now', an expression of my who.

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New Skills, Fantasies of Fame and Fortune

New skills, ambitions, fantasies. I am thinking now of ways to build web galleries, sites, that will empower me to share the works I've made to a wider audience. Till now, I've been giving it away.

Perhaps I can allow myself, give myself permission to put a price, a monetary value on the things I've made.

It will entail web pages that have to do with buying and selling. Hmmm.

Being, Having Been An Outsider

Since childhood, I've come to see myself as 'On The Outside', an 'Outsider'

We had no such word for it in the decades of the 30's and 40's. Back then, the word that worked was 'Rebel', as in 'Rebel Without A Cause.' The title to a star-making movie with James Dean. If I thought at all about defining myself, it was as 'The Rebellious Adolescent'. My parents could connect with that. Also as I learned of it in Brooklyn College: 'Defiant Of Authority'.

I wore Such a puerile sense of my own rebelliousness without the compensation of notoriety of being any kind of celebrity. Long decades went by. I sought other aspects of who I was by searching for my origins. Who was my 'Real Mother?' There was in 'identity' a child born to a woman I never knew about, was never told of?. The searching of this aspect of 'My Who' led down many other paths.

Given the documents and records that I was indeed my father's son, there was this ambivalence as to which woman better deserved credit for who I was and how I turned out. Legitimacy and illegitimacy made a mess of my psyche. Was not ever to find closure or complete composure as to finding my Who. Not as a Jew, nor as boy or man 'believing' I 'Belonged.' Not really anywhere except in the precincts of my own home with my own wife and daughter.

No affirmation, nor dedication at any moment in space and time to G-d or Country.

Through the twenties, thirties, forties, even till now, I've despaired of emotionally feeling capable of anything real authentic 'As A Member Of'. No sense of being 'A Member Of'. More 'Impostor.' The feeling is what I'm referring to. The sense of the word, my choosing it. 'Outsider'.

At times it felt merely inappropriate. A secret I kept. I'd smile secretly. Say silently 'Imposter. ' Tongue-in=cheek. Too much sorrow and grief. Anger, too. Shame. Yes. (Self denigrating.) It was about my insignificance. My being in other people's lives 'On The Periphery.', A status in society that had my name thus ordained.

Anger, inadmissible and outrageous: unpardonable, intolerable.

Undeserved.

Obscene. More invidious than outright torture or brutish punshment! Anonymity. Had I ever wanted celebrity -adulation? Ha! My oxygen. How often have I felt stifled at its absence. What I needed was my name in The Paper, my name in the History Books. Ha ha!

Now, years gone by, those deluded aspirations not nearly gratified< I am who I am. Not quite 'a Shapiro', not a 'Jewish jew'. After a fashion am 'a full time' artist mathematician.

A New Yorker. A Long Islander... Husband. Father, Old Timer,

A 'Loner' still (Nothing denigrating.)

In the art world the loner comes in many grades -short of qualifying as an 'Outsider' in the art marketplace or Museum Row. Capitol 'O' outsiders are au currant, designate the naive, the unschooled, the primitive maker of art objects, highly sought after. Ubiquitously on exhibition.

In my case a misnomer. My stuff (Book Art, Mail Art, Copier Art, Algorithmic Drawings. etc). I'm an entirely 'Other-kind- outsider. (small 'o'.) Unknown, unpropitiated. The old guy, the too advanced in years to be lumped in with the unexhibited new-be emergent artists.

2/19/09

Just When I Think I've Cleared The Last Impediments

Just when I think I'm in the clear, I've disengaged from the last brambles, I am humbled, learned humility: I collide with clean glass doors, my faced dented by the metal frames of my glasses. I forget things, my keys, my wallet, my cell phone.



Blood breaks the skin in two places. Dries about when the ambulance drivers arrive. The rat poison I take every day prevents the blood that is beneath my skin from clotting. Bleeding continues inside my skin, leaves huge visible discolorations. Those who see me during the week that followed see 'd been badly beaten up. I tell people it was NOT my wife. A brush with my 'mortality' happens frequently. I live daily with reminders of how old I am and my Humpty Dumptyiness.

I'm monitored closely. The dosage of thewarfarin must be insufficient, not too little or too much. A hyperdermic needle in my arm extracting blood is never invisible, always leaves bruises that takes a week to fade. Even as I sit here writing, I've this massive bruise on the right side of my face. The blotch slides down, pulled by gravity, till it is eventually absorbed.

So I can with reason conceive entitlement to feel for those on chemo. They and I face imminent extinction. Thus far I've been spared. My dear friends have not been so fortunate. They, I -we do what we are able.

Fortitude, fortitude -I, they do what we are able to -are, within dire limits, capable.




Just when I'm in the clear, or think I am taught humility: Am served daily with reminders, (redundencies) of ...
of incremental diminishments, incapacitiesies. Mightlily do I determine to stay focussed, keep my calendar, log, tod do lists, muddle through....

January Travails

"Travails."
"Ordeals."

Moments, days, weeks, I'm talking about experiences with this work I do. Talk of "My work makes me." (Owns me too. )

It was more than a year since I made this drawing. The illusion is that these polygons are 2, 3 layers deep, and behind them is an infinite blackness, an abyss, a vast darkness, a cosmos.

As to what I was doing, thinking, feeling I can't recollect. Not without consulting my drawing book notes and logs from that time period. (These store bought black books are not just fro drawing; I keep my logs, in them -some record tracking significant events, get glimmers later of to how I felt. 'Enduring' when the events were hardships bouts with ailments or what I call 'my misadventures'. (Read: un-adventures.) The daily misplacing and or forgetting my wallet, keys glasses.... -mishaps. I do not beat myself about it. I (ha!) take it in my stride....

Right up to and and including giving Annette, NancyKay an eightieth birthday party -inviting some old friends and current neighbors, new friends and colleagues.. We did it at Bottino's on 9th between W 24 and 25th in Manhattan.



From that party to and beyond into January I was inhot water, thinking I wrecked my website, lost the entire 'ufemisms,com web site. For a while, it entirely disappeared. Gone. I face the consequences and tell myself, "No looking back." The whole e enterprise undone after my having purchased a spanking new 17" Mac Book Pro.

This idea I had, "Learn to be my own web master! Doable." Sure. I'd be my own webmaster! (Read webwaster.") Ha! The lone and only web address that was up and working is this one. Agony of agonies? A sort of lightness of being? I am very relaxed. The serenity is my atenolol tablet calming me down. The end is not as 'imminent'

Kim, Arthur, Eva: they know fear and dread -enduring the agonies of chemo, the scurring to doctors, hospitals, even to other cities like Kim at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore...

Still way off. -not nearly coping with that kind of brink ... Well, not that stage of annihilation.

PS: My web provider was able to recover the missing site. It is up and running after all.


At this moment I'm looking at a page in one of my drawing books -its dated 2/21/08 ... mentions I'm planning a mailart series of books. The recipients are archivists, gallery directors, colleagues, also a friend or two. Some 26 plus envelopes to address, weigh, lick stamps for and mail. I'd been on a binge of doing a lot of drawing. Happily gratified I've as many favorites to scan, print -replicate. They fill the pages of my book/mailart numbered and signed editions. These are looking more like my ones of a kind 'Waste-Nots'. These are laser replications using a new HP copier/printer/scanner. Oh Wow!


All of 2008 (except toward the end) was a great year! The book artist loves the library, -Blithely goes to as many different branches of them for readings on cosmology. I'm in bliss thinking how I will be remember having read what will years later be regarded as 'The Great Books' on the subject. My musings lead me to lead small library discussion groups in Long Beach, giving Interactive topics like "Does the Universe Have a Purpose?" Workshops that are more about evolution and cosmology, the Big Bang and the expanding universe. Ah,me, those of bible-reading prognosticators. How they gnash their teeth! I was making and fantasizing that my '5gontess' jpeg'd pages were so very 'really cosmological'.

I wind down doing volunteering: the '08 spring art festival (Art Launch). For the last time, (I hope/think.) Perhaps.
Meanwhile I'm doing workshops at Molloy College in Rockville Center, the New York City Math Fair later in march, the Family Math Day in Massapequa,....

Above is a view of kids assorted members of their families in one of the galleries at the art museum where I was invited (and paid too) to present activities that were 'hands on'. The show was of art inspired by numbers, geometry and mathematics.

The bald bearded guy in the glasses, the tallone toward the left (in the blue jacket): that's me.

The one who spent months 'agonizing, harnessed'. How I 'endured'! The anxieties, the agonies!-in the thrall of "Travails!" Yes, "Ordeals" preparing for it, "Moments, Days, Weeks" ..... hacking away at this difficult work I say I love so much. Yes, the "Work That Makes Me," Just now, I'm grateful I'm still up to staying the course, doing it.