Cathy Smith Do the Maths - Art by Numbers in the Year of the Tiger November 2022

Do the Maths - Art by Numbers in the Year of the Tiger

Cathy Smith, Red Tree Gallery, 2022

Well I’m not sure which arrived in our area first – Covid or Kmart, but both have certainly impacted my recent art ventures.

During the various lockdowns I became smitten with the range of locally available tropical plants which had evolved in far more exotic climes, and discovered they would survive, and indeed thrive, on the north-facing windowsills in our winter frosts area.  As a slavish follower of fashion, I acquired a variety of plants with large colourful leaves and started sketching…

During the various lockdowns, I needed to significantly change my 3 -dimensional activities.  One fateful morning I wandered into the craft/art section of the new store and discovered an eclectic range of low cost and potentially disposable supplies, including paper based and haberdashery items, as well as a paint by numbers canvas, and embroidery kits with detailed and numbered instructions for regarding colour use, in ordered steps.  These have proved invaluable for experimenting and for trialing ideas for more permanent work.

The first paint by numbers canvas was titled “Leopard Lady” and featured a dusky maiden suitably surrounded by Amazonian potted plants and seated next to a presumably vegetarian leopard…My obsessive side, familiar with big cat markings, questioned the title and soon confirmed that dusky maiden’s feline companion, as depicted, is in fact a cheetah. (google it) The leopard had indeed changed its spots.

In a mildly desperate moment I purchased my first ‘Leopard Lady’ canvas, (also my first paint by numbers canvas) and set to painting it, using the supplied paint but my own brushes.  I hated the process, finding it very difficult to both stick with the specified, flat colours, and to stay within the lines.  I eventually resorted to adding my own embellishments based on my house plants, and my enthusiasm for Henri Rousseau’s paintings.

I became fascinated by the way Andy Warhol changed the flat colours in his prints and began experimenting with colour substitution and subsequently began expanding my compositional changes…

Having wasted too much of my life in the company of 2 mathematicians, I have a long-standing interest in the underlying mathematical criteria used to identify a ‘good’ work in traditional western art, and design theory and practice.  I’m also fascinated by various theories and terminology I’ve encountered in recent years and the bewildering ways in which they apply (or don’t) to our everyday life.  Who would have thought that integer numbers have a use, and result in the rounding up of our payment at the supermarket checkout, or that the addition of zero to our number system (Arabic numbers) “helps us understand that we can use math to think about things that have no counterpart in a physical lived experience…without zero modern electronics would not exist.”  I’m basically a sculptor who enjoys constructing things, hitting things and admires Sierra’s corner pieces.  However: these mathematical principles also form the basis of Western ‘progress’ underpinning our culture in a myriad of ways from developing bombs and space craft, to uTube lessons that teach one how to draw a tiger in easy, numbered steps.

The mixed media work shown here is the product of the above interests and experiments, and a celebration of The Year of the Tiger.