Please…for the love of my sanity. I’ve researched this topic relatively extensively and I just feel more and more stupid. I understand the rule of thirds. I understand the compounding numbers or whatever. However, a majority of the time I see the sequence imposed onto an image, all I can think is “okay, but…how? There’s nothing really significant about where that’s placed.”
Example: (poor example because I can kind of see how this makes some sense, but still)
https://imgs.classicfm.com/images/25767?crop=16_9&width=660&relax=1&signature=zaV1b3MFv0hIC0a41oGLG3CvQ7I=
Is it really just that it’s more busy in the “center” and it gets exponentially less busy? Am I overthinking it? Am I an idiot? What’s with the spiral? Is it just demonstrating the direction of the exponentiating, or does it have to do with the spacing of the colors or shapes on the image?
In: Mathematics
I’m not an artist, but I have some life experience with people seeing patterns where there are none, and this seems to be one of these things. Just reading through this article here…
[https://www.markmitchellpaintings.com/blog/the-fibonacci-sequence-in-artistic-composition/](https://www.markmitchellpaintings.com/blog/the-fibonacci-sequence-in-artistic-composition/)
…it just seems to me that there is no substance to this at all. In the very first example, he shows with the top spiral that it counts when the line traces something in the painting, like the shadow on the upper left or the womans neck. Fine. But then he continues to list everything that is in between the lines as well as evidence for the spiral. As if everything can be evidence for the spiral if you want to.
In the second example he supports his argument with the center of the spiral being on a focal point, but that was not the case with either spiral in the first example.
Also note that in the first and the last example, he starts out by placing the spiral so that it touches the edges of the paintings on three sides and starts his argument from there. But in the other two examples, if he did that, the whole spiral would end up higher than he wanted, therefore he did not do that and hoped that no one would notice. In the second picture, the center would not be in her eye, but somewhere in her hair, making his argument baseless. In the third picture, “the upper right square is delineated by the horizon” would not work since the horizontal line would end up quite a bit above the horizon.
The whole thing just reeks of utter BS to me. It seems to be one of there things that no one in the art world dares to call out because that would make him look like he is the one who just does not understand it. But I’m afraid the emperor has no clothes.
Designer here.
We use it to divide layouts into sections that are “pleasing” to the eye. It’s used in architecture as well. A lot of things in nature grow in a similar system – so it feels familiar and “makes sense” to our brain. It’s a rough layout guide, sometimes it helps to section the information we try to convey in a way that’s easy to absorb. SOMETIMES.
Most of the time people pflaster it randomly over images without any thought. Like the Mona Lisa one. You would apply it over the whole layout, not just the section that fits your needs.
If people have to explain their image looks good/correct because they used the curve they are doing it wrong.
tl;dr Makes sense sometimes, mostly used completely wrong.
If you take a picture with a lot of complexity to it, you could overlay a Fibonacci spiral and it would coincide somewhere with elements of the picture. Its just coincidence and means nothing.
Take the same picture and overlay, say, a pentagram, or hell just a penguin instead and you’ll get the same.
The whole Fibonacci meme is just bs.
It’s because it’s been proven wrong. You could place the vector of a fibonacci basically anywhere on a painting and it would create the illusion of order.
Latest Answers