Dada Broadside (March 31, 2016)

I was asked to create a Dada Broadside for a Dada exhibit and Dada Journal coming soon. The exhibit is titled, ‘Dada Lives’ and will be held at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash Gallery from April 25 – June 3, 2016. I have submitted five pieces to the show. The Dada Journal is titled, “MetaDada: The International Journal of Dada Mining” and I have submitted six images to the journal. One of the curators, Mike Sanders, asked me to create a broadside for the show and/or journal. A broadside is a single sheet of inexpensive paper printed on one side often with a ballad, rhyme or illustration. Below is the piece I created – a parody of an old magazine ad.

Rabbit Shadow (March 20, 2016)

This morning I woke up and as I was getting my water to fill my tea pot, I noticed this amazing shadow. It is a shadow of my dish soap container – I was shocked how much it looked like a rabbit.

Delicate Ice Formation (March 10, 2016)

As the weather starts getting warmer and before we all get used to Spring, I wanted to post these photos that I took this winter. I became fascinated by the structure of this ice formation in a creek with flowing water. The top layer of the water was frozen over but the water was running underneath the frozen layer. This formation reveals a window into the running water underneath. I love the fragile, thin, clear ‘upper lip’ of the window and watching how it was formed by the trickling of the water below.

Golden Spiral in a Decaying Tree (March 2, 2016)

I photographed this very obvious example of the ‘golden spiral’ in this decaying trunk of a tree. The ‘golden spiral’ is a logarithmic spiral whose factor of growth is phi. Phi is the initial letter of the Greek sculptor Phidias and symbolizes the golden ratio. The golden ratio is a  factor in many natural patterns of growth and has been known and used for many years by artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci for various aesthetic composition in living things. Basically, the idea is that the golden spiral gets wider or further from its origin by a factor of phi (1.61803399) for every quarter turn it takes. This ‘golden spiral’ was brought into the public awareness with the book and movie “The Da Vinci Code” but has been used and known by every student that has attended an art college.

The first image is my photograph of this decaying tree trunk and the second image is a drawing of the mathematical ‘golden spiral’.