[posted here with permission]

 

I woke up to this message this morning...

 

Dianne Amico April 12 at 11:12pm Report

 

Hi, Loree -

I'd never noticed before [perhaps I wasn't paying attention], but what I"m seeing here is that people see faces/animate objects when the line of symmetry is vertical; it seems to bring that out. When the axis is horizontal, not so much. Think about it; if you only saw half a face [left or right side], would you think of it as a face? Or if you only saw the top or bottom half of the image of an animate being, would you identify/empathize with it as much as you would if you saw the whole being? Like magic - put a mirror on an image from nature and it becomes human/oid. Do it with geometric shapes and it doesn't work so well. Is it because you add order/balance to a random image? Or maybe, because your eye has to stop and see the pattern again in reverse, and it reminds us of that which is most familiar to us?

In any case, your images are a delight; so much going on, and so much to discover. Thanks for posting and discussing.

- Dianne

 

It's funny how someone saying something just slightly differently from how I've been looking at it - the same thing, but approaching from a different direction - can set me off on a whole 'nother run of thought.    Let's try this.  Back to the Bear In Buckskins referenced yesterday, but not illustrated.

 

This is the source image.

 

Source image for the Bear In Buckskins; Mirror 069

 

This is the Bear.  Source image stitched on the vertical.

 

Mirror 069

 

This is the source image stitched on the horizontal.

 

Source image stitched horizontally

 

It's interesting enough, I suppose. But not in a human way.  It holds no magic, no story. It's just geometry and tricks.

 

Symmetry to us is right and left, not up and down.  And, more than that, what we think is symmetry is kind of irrelevant.  Some things work for me and some don't.  I want the hidden things - crave them even.  Want the secrets and the mysteries and the things just out of sight to come more clear.  Maybe, some day, to understand them.  I want to believe there are some sort of beings behind the surfaces of things.

 

I want to feel like I'm a part of something big.

 

The Bear In Buckskins does that.  And delights me.  Feeds me.  Still, after more than a year.  Every day when I walk by that spot on the trail, now changed by weather and growth and death, I know that the Bear was there once. And that I got to find him. 

 

That seems like a good thing.

 

And, yes, order and balance.  We don't have much of that.  So there is something about being able to bring a kernel of order out of the chaos - complete chaos - that nature (the world) is, that is immensely gratifying.  I'm not sure the eye stops and sees the pattern in reverse.

 

I think it's just a new whole.

 

Thank you, Dianne.

 

LLH;  04.13.11