art with constraints
November 4, 2023
At the intersection of art and science lies art with constraints. When I first picked up a pencil to write and draw, I realized that the constraints had been there all along, that individual components could always answer to a total form—the beat of a poem felt through its evenly-syllabled lines, the gravitational effect of free fall when sketching clothes and hair, the calculated randomness of pointillism that was essentially Seurat’s version of pixels. When you impose constraints like rhythm and proportions to art, it becomes so much less daunting, like meeting an unmasked Dementor and realizing it’s just skin and bones like the rest of us.
Math is everywhere in art, especially the art that I’ve become invested in. It governs the laws of color theory, where I learned to mix burnt sienna with eyeballed accuracy of red, yellow, and just a smidge of blue. It manifests in the matrices I use to rig and transform a cow mesh into a realistically moving creature. I threw hours into studying Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to understand how geometry guides something as personal and abstract as our growth. Even experimenting with camera controls was a function of time, proving that time too is just another piece to manipulate in an animator’s equation.
Societal context adds another layer of intricacy to the basic mathematical rules. The Vitruvian Man’s proportions fall apart when applied to average African ratios. Poetry no longer rhymes when translated to another language. The same arc shot with different lighting could produce vastly different results for a horror movie versus a commercial ad.
I’ve come to the conclusion that to create applied art, I must first be a mathematician and scientist. And to create good applied art, I need to understand the societal context of my work. I used to think that the creative and the logical were so disjoint, but I’ve found that my niche in the art world is when they are layered together like an Oreo cookie; logic first to ground the creativity in realism, and then another dose of logic when the finished product brings about discussions and philosophies. It’s here, at the intersection of art and science, that I find anything but contradictions.