Personal Aesthetics & Math

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Now taking in all 8 artworks, what math do you see?

These are some of the ideas that came out of our discussion:

• Each picture has a horizontal band that one could look at in terms of area
• It reminded me of bar graphs where the bar is divided into different colors – like a kind of pie chart
• The proportions of the Rothko paintings – the painting on right has similar orange and yellow sections, which are about the same size as the red. In the third painting, the orange is almost double the blue, in the second the orange is almost 1.5 times the yellow
• Negative space in the borders around the paintings- also, the negative space on the slide around the 8 images, imagining the shape that is left over
• Size – I have ideas about size of the things in the photographs, but with the paintings I have no idea how big they are (I have been surprised before)
• Volume – paint spread out is a different way of thinking about the volume of a can
• The orange above the blue reminds me of my whiteboard after I’ve been teaching
• A lot of defined, regular shapes – which made me ask, what are those shapes and what are not that (like the trees for examples, which are fractals) 
• Angles and perspective 
• All of these images are rectangular

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What is similar between these statements? What is different?

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Next, we shared an array of images by Mark Rothko and Amy Vickers and asked everyone a create a few pairs or sets. 

As you create the pairs and sets, ask yourself, “What am I caring about?”

Trust the aesthetic within you when you notice things. Believe that you are seeing real art. Use math to investigate what you see.

You can use Google Slides:

Or you can use the Amplify Polypad:

We came back together and everyone shared at least one of the friend pairs/groups they made from the images.

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Finally, we offer these tools for using math to dig deeper into your aesthetics:

A Polypad for exploring color, proximity, and ratio.

A Polypad for exploring measurement