Fibonacci Numbers and Spirals

4" x 4" (image)
4-color reduction woodcut
Edition of 7 on various types and size sheets of white paper

As I made this latest ammonite print I thought, This is the last one. I've done enough of them, and there's no where else I want to go with it. 

But after it was finished, I felt somewhat differently - like I'm giving up on a quest. I've been making prints of ammonites for about a year and a half now, and I feel that this whole time I've been grasping to get hold of certain things, some of which I've found, but others which I've yet to discover.

The problem is that I question whether mathematically intriguing and aesthetically captivating spirals found in the impressions of once flourishing creatures that went extinct millions of years ago is a combination of thoughts so mind-blowing in-of-itself that I'm just being silly trying to capture something about it in art. This is the reason I never paint sunsets; they are so awe-inspiring to experience in reality, what the hell would I do with that in art?

Argh, what to do? Think on it some more, I suppose. Better yet, get back to work on my picture book "The Nautilus and the Ammonite." In completing that project, maybe I will figure out whether and how I might continue this related body of work.

"Hundertwasser 4" by Margaret Rankin

It has been way too long since I wrote about a print by the talented Margaret Rankin. (Last time was in 2010.) This image has been used with the artist's permission. Information about her and links to her online store, blog, Flickr, and Facebook pages can be found here.

I was especially drawn to this image because of my recent interest in ammonites, specifically ammonite fossil fields such as the one pictured below.

Photographs such as the one below feel like images of a mass burial, unearthed. Each fossilized shell is a spiral into infinity, unseen. Immortal, yet extinct; it is an eerie juxtaposition. In a small, strange way, I feel as if sacred ground has been desecrated, some secret, dark knowledge, revealed.

But in Rankin's print, I feel warmth and life. The spirals there tumble and roll, rise and sink, expand and contract. Though they are compartmentalized into rows, some break free, while others dig tunnels, build ladders, or otherwise expand their small place in the world. All seem to move and breath.

The title of her piece is after the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, known for his colorful paintings. As you can see from the example below, Haus im Wind (I), he also had an interest in spirals and bringing inanimate subjects alive with color and movement.

"Ammonite: Fissure"

Twelth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, burlap, lace, chipboard, and string. 

“What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.” 

“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”  

Both quotes from Virginia Woolf

"Ammonite: Atoms"

Eleventh in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, burlap, chipboard, bubble wrap, and string. 

"The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?" -Joyce Carol Oates  

"Ammonite: Process of Elimination"

Tenth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, chipboard, and string. 

"The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed--it is a process of elimination." -Elbert Hubbard 

"Ammonite: Filigree"

Ninth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, lace, and string. 

"Life is a filigree work... What is written clearly is not worth much; it's the transparency that counts." -Louis-Ferdinant Celine 

Elizabeth Busey prints of Spirals In Nature

Images posted with the permission of the artist. More about Busey's work can be found on her website and blog.

The whole universe is based on rhythms. Everything happens in circles, in spirals. 

-John Hartford 

I'm interested in spirals lately, inspired by the amazing wood engravings by Beth Krommes that I discovered in the picture book Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature. This summer, spirals were the theme for the collographs made by my students.

Below are Busey's brief statements associated with these three images (in quotes) followed by my responses.

Ship of Pearl

"Growing in the cool, deep waters of the Pacific, a chambered nautilus expands its shell home in a perfect logarithmic spiral."

I stand at the top of a staircase. There is nothing particularly interesting about this floor itself. The fiery steps, luscious like slices of sashimi, are where it's at. If I dare to step, I've no doubt I will shrink like Alice, and enter a whole new world of wonder in the infinite below.

Great Unknown

"A swirl of larger and smaller light particles form our conception of the Milky Way Galaxy. Scientists theorize that the galaxy is a spiral shape, with a bar of brilliant light at the core."

Caught: a single, still moment in the galaxy's restless dance. Purple streaks drag across the blackness of space like strokes of paint in Van Gogh's Starry Night. Dots of yellow confetti swarm in the center, while others of a greater variety of hue float on the edges around a swirl that reminds me of the skirt of a Flamenco dancing woman. I feel the burning sensation in her breast. 

Captured

"A spider web captures perfect orbs of water. The web is the universal spiral seen in everything from galaxies to seashells." 

The dew at dawn makes visible this trap. Beads glisten and seem as hard and permanent as stone, each it's own contained world. The faint lines of the web appear deceptively delicate. So lovely is this harbinger of doom.