Sacred Geometry: Radically Round
Published in Conscious Design Magazine, May, ’08
Karen Fitzgerald
In 1988 I made my first round painting. Working on a suite titled Nine Mysteries, I was challenged by the problem of creating a successful composition to express the ideas of mysteries on a vertical rectangle. The corners were so troublesome! My stretcher maker brought me a scrap, a round panel left over from making a larger tondo (a Renaissance term for round panel.) All my problems vanished when I began working on that first circle. I have never looked back. Many artists will tell you how terrible the tondo tends to be. Not me. When I began working on this magic form it felt as though I’d arrived “home”. Yet round forms are rare enough in the art world to cause wonderment. Why is round so radical?
Roundness reminds us of our remote origins. It reattaches us to the whole world. The round form complements and rhymes with architectural and spatial forms. It creates synergy in a room, contributing not only to the flow of chi but also to the balance of energy. The tondo form is presentational rather than re-presentational. It presents qualities that underlie the visible world, those things of profound, essential importance.
From my perspective, the Western tradition of the rectangle reaches back to physical references. During the Renaissance, artists began to work less on site-specific work such as frescoed ceilings and mosaic applied to walls between architectural frameworks and began to produce work that was designed with its own independent support. Frames to support a canvas surface were necessarily based on right angled construction. Windows are framed in this same manner and much has been written about the space of Renaissance painting – its depth and accuracy according to this “view out the window”.
A few artists created tondo work for specific sections of altar panels. Many hybrid rectangular works were also produced as parts of altars, works with an arched or pointed top. Rose windows continued to be produced to solve the empty architectural space at the apex of the triangle in cathedral facades. Very few artists have embraced the tondo form for its own aesthetic qualities, separate from architectural necessity.
My work is centered on the soul’s experience in the physical plane. Over time I have produced a large body of work that reflects the experience of being in the world – a reinterpretation of the landscape tradition. My newer works use gilding extensively. Working with silver, 23k gold, copper and aluminum leaf, I uncovered attributes of the material unavailable in oil paint. Gold leaf possesses a trans-substantial quality – it is at once very physical and also as ephemeral as the wind. Several years ago I created a small group of paintings called Entropy Undone. They were ruminations on transformation: what happens at a point of transformation? What does physical transformation look and feel like? The title refers to our world – our entropic, physical plane. Things tend to degenerate in our world, yet there are moments when this degeneration stops or is reversed, when something transforms. All these works stem from that idea – imagining the point when entropy becomes undone.
Embedded as we are in this physical world, we often see in a limited, literal sense. From the time I was a youngster I’ve experienced being in the world not just as a sensory excitation, but also as a spiritual-emotional-thinking-feeling being-ness. When I am in the world in this way, I understand a wide, deep sense of connection. It is, to a certain degree, ineffable. Poets have spent their lives trying to articulate this aliveness, and feeling that they failed to do so.*
For me, painting is the language that allows communication about this kind of experience. And roundness allows the language to go narrow, to go deep, without the distortion due to confusion with the physical coordinates of our world. The circle is free from gravity, free from the associations of standing embedded in a vertical rectangle, and free from the horizontal associations with the land we live on. If there is such a thing, the tondo form is a telescopic bridge between the heavens and our earth, between the visible and the invisible.
Over the past several years, roundness has begun to suffuse the design world. It’s visible in upholstery fabrics, floor coverings, furniture design. Round mirrors have been around for a longer time as signature pieces. It is time for the tondo to assert its special qualities and to be embraced as the powerful form that it is.
* Czeslaw Milsoz, comments on this in his Nobel prize lecture of 1980.
