INTRODUCTION

There is a universal recognition of good proportion running throughout the beauty of nature, and art.

We recognise good proportion in the same way as we know how to divide a line in half or erect a perpendicular. We easily agree that an object of art has good or bad proportion, or that this face looks too long, or too short and out of proportion. This magical connecting thread of proportion, known since antiquity, is non other than the Golden Proportion, a phenomenon related to beauty.


The following notes illustrate just a few facets of the mystery and magic of this proportion. The understanding of this concept will enable the reader to take a first step on a journey of discovery into an unexpected dimension of beauty which affects our lives at every turn. It is one of the building blocks of beauty that we can easily apply to our own art work, confident of success.

  To examine the validity of the Golden Proportion quickly and easily, an instrument, the GOLDEN MEAN GAUGE was developed to study this proportion              
The GOLDEN MEAN GAUGE
  
 
The gauge as seen in the picture to the right, shows that the numerous major landmarks on the moth's wing below are in the Golden Proportion.The first magical feature to understand is that the beauty of nature shows not just one simple Golden proportion but a multiple of relationships in the Golden Proportion.
Can we copy this in our works of art?
 

 

THE CONCEPT

 

The concept of the Golden Proportion is easy to understand but it's very simplicity has been perplexing and so this enchanting proportion has thus not been appreciated at large. Hard to believe that such a simple concept can be at the core of so much confused discussion about proportion

 

Proportion usually implies a relationship between a larger and a smaller. To clarify the Golden Proportion concept, the adjacent figure shows a number of pairs of lines of different lengths and their ratio to each other. The last line shows the ratio of 1 to 0.618, which is the simplest form of the Golden Proportion.

 

   

Eddy Levin
23 Church Vale,
London, N2 9 PB
Tel: +44 208 292 2662

eddylevin@goldenmeangauge.co.uk