Paris Stories: Unlearn What You've Learned (Part IV)

Unlearn What You've Learned (Part IV):

(Paris) Along with differences in age, language, size, and demeanor; between us walked our constant companion, his art. Training alongside the verbal, linear logic of legal precedence, my companion spun mathematical formulas out of his mind into symmetrical circles of exacting care, drawn softly with pencil and later illuminated with black & white acrylic paint.

As the practical, grounded, first-born daughter of an accountant and a classroom English teacher, my style epitomized the ascending power of the American Female Lawyer. It is true that women still struggle in the workplace for equality, but my experience was like a clear, fortunate passage into a profitable career.  At the same time, Gabriel showed me how an unorganized giant, uncomfortable in his own skin, could give his art the hyper-focus it demanded; producing large scale paintings that drew your eye into a tunnel of precision, a mystical maze of fastidious circles.

His art bloomed out of more than a mere triquetra (trinity knot), it subtly revealed the sacred artistic geometry of life; exact, mathematical, but more than just slide rules and protractors. Exhibiting the formulas of Fibonacci and the ancient truths of a sunflower’s pattern of seeds, the paintings communicated the consistent, repeatable thread of life going back to the beginning—the historic symmetry of the human struggle.

[artist and author]

Drawing by hand, sequences appearing to have come from a CAD drawing and a laser printer, Gabriel believed the complete, ancient flower of life formed an inter-dimensional tool, like a portal. Meditation showed him a mental window into what some call the inter-space plane. Not only therapeutic, his mind now had a factory in which to process traumatic stress that had once destroyed and dismantled his natural genius. He patiently waited, unbridled the yoke of mental illness, practicing his art with hope, and what Cameron calls our true nature:

"No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity. . . . I have come to believe that creativity is our true nature, that blocks are an unnatural thwarting of a process at once as normal and as miraculous as the blossoming of a flower at the end of a slender green stem." (end quote) by Julia Cameron 

Gabriel created two series of curves winding in opposite directions, drawing with a fine mechanical pencil. Beginning at the center, they stretched out to the widest part of his canvas like petals. With each seed-shaped unit sitting at a certain angle from the neighboring seeds, he demonstrated the precision of a spiral, which exists everywhere in the physical universe. The angle found in the “flower-of-life” is the universal “juste-milieu”; yet, it is the most irrational number imaginable for such a drawing, a feeble approximation of a fraction. This number is sometimes called the golden mean, or the golden angle, which is 137.5⁰.

Aristotle thought the angle was the middle point between extremes, e.g., if courage is a virtue, its excess could manifest in one extreme as recklessness, and in deficiency, cowardice. The Greeks thought the golden mean was artistically beautiful but at the same time closely associated with mathematics, being both beautiful and true. Because the best known group of American artists are usually said to be the abstract expressionists of the “New York” style, my artistic palate wasn’t typically exposed to this degree of exactness, but I guess the lawyer in me liked it? Gabriel helped me realize that the artist often must "unlearn" what she has learned, in order to know her path. ##

Fiction ©Mark H. Pillsbury