John Hiigli
I am a transparent, geometric painter; the co-founder/co-director of Le Jardin a l'Ouest (the French-American Pre-school); I am the founder/president of Jardin Galerie (children's art gallery). I attended the University of Indiana in the early sixties, the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in the middle sixties, Empire State College in the middle eighties and Bank Street Graduate School of Education in the late eighties. I wrote my Masters Thesis at Bank Street on John Dewey, Jean Piaget and Richard Buckminster Fuller. I have been painting with transparent oil paint for over thirty years. . I endeavor to create certain images of totality, images that are optical and energetic—not a “signal” or transmitter, or point of reception of “something else”-but objects, states of mind, visions that stand for what they are in and of themselves.
I first saw the hyper-cross in a Salvador Dali painting, where eight tesseracts are stacked together to build a hyper-pyramid. My friend Stephen Weil did a drawing of the structure in Mathematica. I had the drawing "blown up" at a graphics art studio and then transferred it to a canvas on the wall. In many sessions I painted the eight cubes, beginning with the surfaces farthest from the observer, working my way forward to the front surfaces, using a small roller. When the painted "hyper-cross" had dried I asked David Davis Art Supply to frame the canvas according to the principal of "shaped canvas," which I had become familiar with from friends in Budapest involved in MADI. Subsequently Janos Saxon & I created a similar, metal (aluminum) sculpture and exhibited it in the summer of 2011 in Slovakia. I was inspired to create the transparent hyper-cross in an attempt to disclose the beautiful symmetries of its very simple (x-y-z) structure.
Three skew icosahdrons are embedded in an Isotropic Vector Matrix. In Synergetic Geometry the Isotropic Vector Matrix is a "family" of polyhedrons united by a common edge-length: tetrahedron (V = 1), prime vector radius cube (V = 3), octahedron (V = 4), rhombic dodecahedron (V = 6), cuboctahedron (V = 20), system vector cube (V - 24). In Chrome 190 there are several cubes and several octahedrons. The twelve vertices of each of the three icosahedrons lie on the twelve edges of their respective (3) octahedrons. During my several decades long study of Synergetic Geometry I had painted the IVM many times. I used transparent paint in order to give the viewer a glimpse into the nucleus of this fantastic group of structures. Chrome 190 demonstrates change of scale, wherein the volume of subsequent polyhedra increases/decreases by a factor of 8 with each subsequent iteration. Thus we can suggest that change of scale in painting is equivalent to change in octave in music.
In Chrome 193 a single (skew) Icosahedron is embedded in a octahedron. I had become interested in recent years in using transparent black and white in an effort to communicate the gorgeous beauty of transparency in nature. We see transparency in nature mainly through the mysterious effect of fog on the plain, hovering in mountain and valley and coming off the waters of lakes, rivers and oceans. I wanted to create again the excitement of the icosahedron, with its 20 equilateral faced pentagonal symmetries, but this time using a single icosa hovering within the IVM complex with a few simple colors pushing out of a gray and white transparent mist!