Our wondrous mind or the golden triangle

“Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented – which is what fear and anxiety do to a person – into something whole.” Louise Bourgeois

It’s a pity we are not raised in reflective cultures because increased capacity for presence and inner clarity would make a huge difference both in our personal and collective lives. Meditative practices have the potential to bring forth all that we have not fully felt and headed adequate attention, and thus, give us a second chance at understanding events and releasing trapped emotions. It is like re-reading our life story in a less hurried and distracted way making it our own again.

A few days ago I made the ink drawing posted here today. During the night the red tightrope became salient in my dream. However, in the dream I drew two vertical lines from the top and bottom corners that met the diagonal red line in the drawing. On waking up I did not heed my dream much attention and engaged with my usual mediation practice and sure enough memories of past art history lessons arose. Our professor was obstinately passionate about the golden triangle, which is a compositional element used in visual art. It is based on a triangular theory of vision where lines recede to a point to imply depth and is considered as a geometrically validated subject placement rule. A triangular composition is a classical way of composing an image because the triangle is considered a harmonic structure.  The frame of the image can be divided into four triangles created by drawing a diagonal line from one corner to the other and then two lines from the other corners touching the first line at a 90 degree angle. For a while I had gone around trying to discern the golden triangle in every bit of art I saw.

He had also told me that my pencil drawings were like fine needle work. Some years down the road I started sewing words and phrases on bits of fabrics and then stitching the bits of fabric on drawings. Actually,  I was making a collage of my drawings, bits of fabric, photos and other things as if desperately trying to sew together something torn. Through meditation all these neglected scraps of lived experience came together and became a story again.