38. Spirals attack!

A few weeks ago I noticed (but since then didn't have time to make this post!) that spirals followed me everywhere!  It probably started with the mugs that I made based on Victor's design. I wrote about this design in older posts, but I'll repeat it briefly here. When I took a ceramics class at Columbia University, Victor sent me this drawing that he made long time ago, not even imagining it would ever be implemented in clay.

Since then, I have made at least three attempts to bring this mug to life, every time messing up either glazing, or shape, or both. Finally, I made two mugs right before Victor came to New York in April, and gave one to him. They still weren't perfect, but my free course ended, unfortunately. Soon after that my daughter visited me, and after I showed her the mug, she noticed that it actually repeated the pattern on the rug in my living room. It's interesting that I walk there many times a day and never notice!

Of course, I wouldn't have started a blog post just for this reason. But around the same time Victor sent me this drawing made the day after he returned to Ukraine. Does my (his?) mug have anything to do with it? There is no way to tell. He never answers when I ask him questions like this. All I know that at that time he didn't know about the rug discovery.

After I received this drawing, I told him that I felt that spirals surrounded me, so I needed to make a post about them, and asked if he had any other drawings with spirals. This is the first time ever that I actually asked him to send me something specifically for the blog. He sent a few of his drawings with spirals in them with the comment that a spiral is one of the richest and most ornamental symbols. No wonder it's so common.

  

On top of all of this, in my Math Club last week we discussed spirals associated with the Fibonacci Numbers. This omnipresence of spirals is really scary!

I am not a symbologist and not going to analyze the meaning of spirals; this blog for me is just a way to present my friend's drawings in a somewhat connected and meaningful way.

37. Happy Mother's Day!

I don't need to invent a topic today - it's obvious. And I can always rely on diversity of Victor's topics - there will always be something on any topic, even though in Ukraine there is no Mother's Day as such. They celebrate March 8th which is Women's Day, whether it's a mother or any important woman in your life. But you don't need a special day to celebrate the miracle of motherhood.

These drawings don't really need comments and even titles, but I'll keep the titles that Victor gave them when he sent them to me, all at different times and on different occasions.

 Mother

 Madonna 1

Madonna 2 

Holy Mother 

 

The following two drawings can also (arguably) be placed on this page. Birds don't celebrate Mothers's Day, but we - human mothers - know exactly how they feel.