Functional Art Project
By Eric Harmatz and Truman Dodd
Artist Statement
Our art piece represents an abstract rendition of a “UFO” on a foreign planet. The color scheme we used adds to the mystery of looking at this piece. We chose the curves that we did because we wanted to make the picture look abstract from the start. We thought by making it abstract it would look unique and original, and allow us to learn a lot about the different types of curves while creating a colorful artistic masterpiece. We did the curves in the applications “Grapher” and MathGV. We chose our ground curve to be an inverse sin wave with the help of Darren as it adds to the abstract horizon. The other prominent curve we use is the Talbot’s Curve, making up the body of the UFO. The Talbot’s curve took about an hour to perfect in MathGV. After we were done with our curves, we put them into Adobe Photoshop and transformed them into our design. Color wise, we chose bright florescent colors to bring out the abstract nature of our piece. This art piece took many hours to create and revise. During this process, we learned about curves and how math can be used in graphic design.
We used a plethora of equations in our final product. From the Talbot’s Curve for the UFO to Cycloids for the clouds, the coefficients for each curve play a huge role into the shape of each curve. Some of the complex equations are explained here.
Explanation of Equations
Essential Question Reflection
How can mathematics and art be used to evoke and convey emotions?
For as long as it has been around, art has been used to convey and evoke many different emotions. People look at different kinds of art and can feel many different things. For example when people looked at our picture they were all confused and frustrated with trying to figure out what the meaning behind it was. They wanted it to make sense, which it didn’t, and wasn’t supposed too. I know when I looked at other people’s pictures and they were scenes at the beach it calmed me because I love the beach. Their pictures were surreal while our picture was focused on abstraction. For this project I don’t think its necessarily the math that causes emotion but more the angles that people are used to seeing in everyday life are normal to them and are then not as much of a shock when they see them.
Mathematics is said to cause many emotions however. In a BBC News article called “The Sum of Human Emotion,” written by Professor Ian Stewart, it states that mathematics can very easily cause emotion because people that are truly passionate about math love what they do so much that solving a problem is like a prize for them. Mathematicians are committed to their work.
Almost everybody in the class based their picture off of real things that people see in most everyday life or at least have a knowledge that what they are seeing really does exist. Since the artists chose to make their pictures based on real things the viewers really didn’t have much room to imagine things or decide for themselves what they took away from the picture. For example, a picture of the beach and surfboards, the artists assumed intent was for the audience to look at the picture, see a beach, and going by my own assumption of what I think people feel when they see a picture of the beach, feel happy and relaxed. There was another picture of a butterfly. It was a pretty accurate picture of a butterfly so when I saw it I thought of the butterflies I have seen in my own life. Since I could make those connections to things in my own life and they were “normal” to me there was not confusion and I think I got the emotion the artists were trying to convey.
For our picture however, there were realistic aspects to it but it was more surreal than real. The picture in itself has realistic aspects; there is a house, a tree, mountains, clouds, and the sun. But there is also a plane or UFO of some kind and the mountain range could also be conveyed as waves in an ocean. The clouds are also just curved lines that repeat and then break and there is no connecting point between top and bottom. When we got our peer critiques there was a lot of shown confusion. People didn’t know what was going on so they didn’t know what suggestions to give us other than to make it more realistic and believable, which is what I assumed they meant by saying “What the heck” and “I have no idea.” I think the reason our picture turned out so different was because we started off by picking curves that we thought were visually stimulating and then put them into a picture, instead of what I think most people did by deciding on a picture first and then finding the curves to create the picture.
Personally I think by creating the picture the way we did we left ourselves the option of being more creative. Some of these curves you wouldn’t usually see in a realistic situation. By deciding on a realistic picture it takes away the opportunity to add in unique things, because then the person creating the image can say, “That can’t go in the picture because I’ve never seen that in real life.” But to me, art doesn’t have to be realistic, it is the artist’s own interpretation of things and they can make the picture however they want to. Art is different for everybody and not everyone will take away the same feeling or thoughts on a picture. Eric and I created this picture to what fit the curves we thought were interesting and this is the picture we ended up with.
Draft 2
Draft 1
