John Arden Hiigli

Statement

Hiigli’s work has been fueled by his experiments with geodesic structure in the preschool, his description of geodesic block structures in two United States Patents, and the Symmetry studies described in his Transparent Geometric Paintings. He earned a a Masters Degree in Early Childhood Education at Bank Street Graduate School of Education in New York City, where he focused on the work of Richard Buckminster Fuller (Structure), Jean Piaget (Child Development) and John Dewey (Educational Philosophy). He concluded that for the artist cognitive understanding becomes complete only when knowledge about nature is expressed through the process of making art.

Artworks

Chrome 203 shows twelve groups of three '3/4 squares'. Each group of three '3/4 squares' is enclosed, or contained within a white square, which itself is enclosed within a black square. These groups of three '3/4 squares' are translated both vertically and horizontally. Of course any of these fractal like series of '3/4 squares' can continue indefinitely, or to the limit of ones drawing instruments.

Chrome 204 shows a positive and a negative version of the three '3/4 squares', with alternating rows of the two versions. Note that in the arrangement of the three '3/4 squares' the largest '3/4 square' is not ‘next to’ (in the usual sense) the next largest '3/4 square'. In fact the largest is separated from the next largest by the interjection of the smallest '3/4 square'.

Chrome 206 exhibits six iterations of the ‘3/4 square’. Therefore there are 16 X 6 or 96 '3/4 squares’ in all. For this painting I used a maximum dispersal color system in which there is no next-of-nearest-neighbor repetition of color. The red-orange series is spectral: RO, YO, YG, BG, BV, RV. The other three series (YO, YG, BG) are staggered: (YO, YG, BG, BV, RV, RO); (YG, BG, BV, RV, RO, YO); (BG, BV, RV, RO, YO, YG).