Golden Majesty

It’s called the Golden Ratio. It’s very similar to Fibonacci Sequence in math. It shows up all over the place in nature, from galaxies to hurricanes to snails. It’s so common that I didn’t know it had a name.

You can find it in many things created by humans, especially the visual arts—paintings.

It’s easy to see in Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

Then I started looking at other familiar works—famous ones like Albert Bierstadt’s, “Campfire Site Yosemite.”

But also by living artists I have written about for the past 30 years. This is “Sunset at Tilghman Island” by Jay Peterzell.

And photography. This is by Ansel Adams. Then I started going back through my own paintings.

Forty years ago, I walked down to our little residential “lake.” There was this funny little bird with long legs wading in the shallows. I did some research. It was a stilt sandpiper. I had not seen one before, anywhere. It seemed to bring a message. So did the stars and the moon…and the trees. Dancing. The universe appeared to be dancing in jubilation to a swirling rhythm.

It has been only recently that I discovered that my painting, “The Stilt and the Stars,” has the proportions of the golden ratio.

In the last 35 years, with the Hubble Telescope, we are now on a first name basis with the millions, billions, maybe trillions of disk-like spiral galaxies that look like natural biological formations here on earth.

“The Golden Ratio” is not rigid. I see it as a universal sensitivity; the powerful blueprint of the Divine. Yet, at the same time, a comfort: a boundless connection to eternity.

I am up and down with PTSD. Like many, I can feel lost and isolated but then I look again to the heavens and see the grandeur of creation that surrounds us: from the majestic to the minute, from the mightiest to the tiniest. And I can again feel that joy, that jubilation—the dance of eternity.