While working on this card, thoughts came of mathematics, and then the Symbolist artist Odilon Redon. The math thoughts began almost immediately as I drew some ovals and then made them into flat toruses. It occurred to me that I was inventing laws for them. Examples: the ovals must not touch each other, but they will follow some sort of hard-to-discern alignment. Round-sided triangles will intersect them and change the shade of their insides. The background will have a similar tone-change, seen through the insides of the ovals.
And then, as I ground my pencil into the index card to make the background very, very dark, I thought of Redon, who lovingly called some of his charcoal drawings mes noirs–My Blacks. He liked black. “Black is the most essential color,” he said.
And it came to me that one of his noirs had the title “The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity.” Looked at the card I’d near-finished and something went clickclickclick. Some of the math I learned as a first-semester calculus student, almost half a century ago, had to do with summations, and limits, and what happens when the value of the unknown labeled x approaches . . . infinity.
The summation symbol is the greek Sigma, which looks like this: Σ (lazy M? Broken E? Yet in the Greek alphabet, it represents the S sound. Go figure!). A loose interpretation of the way I Sigma-ized and finished this card is “This is the limit of ICAD 2021 card #11 as G Bowers June 2021 approaches Infinity.” Mathematically all wrong, but artistically acknowledging the influence of Odilon Redon (and also my Drawing & Composition teacher Darlene Goto, who urged us always to render “Darker darks!!”) and revealing a greater truth than the false mathematics: Everything, and all of us, in however minuscule a way, approach Infinity.
One with Clay, Image and Text 