This page features the latest visual compositions, completed
in 2008, through July. Because the images will change with each
new opus, monitor the page periodically. The images may also be
found among the galleries.
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Completed on July
4th is Harbor Nocturne, an obvious representation
although it is essentially an abstract pattern of circles and
lines/bars. It seems that the ghost of Klee was looking
over my shoulder.
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Thelonious in
Chau-Tal depicts and evokes music and, like music itself,
is rooted in mathematics. The jazz of Thelonious Sphere Monk is
unique. He took 4/4 measures and divided their time irregularly
with eights and sixteenth notes and rests and funky arpeggios,
stretching and condensing interbar time yet always hitting the
main beat. Tals are Hindustani rhythms of ragas that range from
5 matra [beats] up to 16 matra, divided into different patterns,
such as the 10 matra jhap-tal, which can be divided as
either 2-6-2 or
2-3-2-3 beats. While ek-tal is 12 beats, often split as 6-6,
chau-tal is also of 12 beats but this rhythm is divided as 4-4-2-2. The
painting has 12 rows, suggestive of standard 12-bar blues.
Moreover, as geeks may have noticed, the use of circle and
vertical bar
follows the binary number system, such that the sum of the four
sections across each row is 12.
Like music, the painting is holistic without a focal point; it
dazzles as the eye searches for relational patterns. The color
juxtapositions are not random but gestaltic. As both jazz and
ragas are improvisational within scales or modes and a root
melody, this painting is similarly inventive within a
fundamental grid, with objective, if achieved, of meshing with
the humanity, essence, and spirit of these and similar musics.
And then there is the serendipitous optical illusion of each
row's fluidity and movement.
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Passage has no story around it. The composition
is self-evident and was rapidly drafted on my sketch pad nearly in
its present form, sans colors.
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Full Circle has a meaningful story to it. My very first morphological
project was not of art but of science. It was a study, conducted 1967 to
1975, of the cell wall-less "L-forms" of streptococcal bacteria, whose
spheres of varying volumes often contained one or more vacuoles, or
fluid cavities, depending on size. I examined them by light,
electron, and scanning electron microscopy. Now being an artist
currently focusing on patterns of Circle & Line, I reprise my
illustrations of L-forms in this new painting. I hope it conveys some of
the joy I felt as a young microbiologist in examining and making
discoveries with the atypical circular creatures.
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Debra Jan Bibel
MORPHOLOGIES:
An Exploration, An Evolution
Fresh Paint
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