Prime concerns: painting number patterns

Abstract

As an abstract artist inspired by a great love for the work of renaissance artist and mathematician Piero Della Francesca, I am now exploring the visual possibilities of working with the prime number series. Della Francesca’s work was ground-breaking in his acutely observational use of naturalistic colour and understanding of three-dimensional space. He used geometry and perspective to construct his pictorial spaces and their contained objects accurately. However, the viewer does not need to understand themathematics to appreciate the beauty of his art. I am using primes to construct my picture spaces; making visually stimulating art that explore pattern, spirals, sequences and areas. As well as employingmathematical concepts, it is important to me that my work reflects my own developing visual sensibilities. The mathematical element is a springboard in my creative process: discovering and manipulating the inherent patterns helps me find visual solutions and outcomes that are satisfying with or without a viewer’s awareness of the underlying maths. In this way, I trust my work has an impact on people. My first venture into primes, entitled Eratosthenes, is a six across and nine deep grid of coloured rectangles and circles. Derived from primes numbers and painted in heavy impasto, it shows how prime values beyond 2 and 3 only occur as multiples of six plus or minus 1. I named it after the ancient Greek mathematician when I later found out that this was essentially a modified Eratosthenes sieve. My Prime Marks artwork (Figure 1), created in 2010, has 72 (15× 15 cm) individual paintings, each representing one number from 1 to 72. Each prime number is represented by a unique icon. The non-prime numbers are represented by a combination of these prime icons to display their factors. For example, the primes 2 and 3 are represented by a yellow chevron and a red triangle respectively. Non-prime 6 is represented by a yellow chevron and a red triangle to show that it is made up of the prime factors 2 and 3. The 72 individual canvases can be arranged in many different grid permutations, and each time they will show a new pattern of icons. There are two arrangements shown here. The first example has eight rows of nine numbers. The top row shows numbers 1–9; the second row 10–18; and so on up to 72. The