Landscape - Beauty and the Beast (LS 2)
The 'Golden Mean' is merely a mathematical ratio usually discerned by the painter as the ratio of the larger side of a rectangle as it relates to the shorter. Derived by the ancient Greeks it can be constructed geometrically or expressed as a simple ratio, namely 1:1618... Like "pi", the number 1.618... is an irrational number. Both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Egyptians used the Golden Mean when designing their buildings and monuments. The builders of Paestum used the Golden Mean in their temples. Artists as diverse as Leonardo da Vinci and George Seurat used the ratio when constructing their paintings.
In classical architecture it was thought this particular ratio was the most pleasing to the eye and its extrapolation into a spiral could be found replicated in nature in such diverse things as pine cones and sea shells or the curve of a fern.
The painting 'Beauty and the Beast' is constructed by using the 'golden mean' - but within a square.

Landscape - Cyberscape (LS 1)
'Our earth,
as an island in space,
seems like a much, much, smaller place.' …. JH

I think it was Blake who examined a grain of sand in the endeavor to discover within such a tiny thing the structure of the world. Such a philosophy echoes in today's world of micro-biology and electron microscopes where the same detail could well be the detail of photographic astronomy showing the birth of the universe which strangely starts to look much like the birth of a single human cell, maybe a virus, or even a crystal. So it was my idea for this painting to take something as familiar to us all as our own face, a TV screen, or their front door and make it into something new. We all are familiar with the map of the world, but can it be displayed classically as a landscape or portrait? Can something so uninteresting be made personal, into a painting, and induce people to take a second or third look? This was my project here. It turned out a rather large painting!