larryf58 wrote:
Here's a bit of trivia.
When I create these, I don't necessarily make one element and copy it to paste several times. The symbols are aligned in their containers and the containers are aligned around the rosette by hand and by eye. Same with the monogram itself. Partly that's because some of them have to placed by hand to fit properly, but there's another reason.
In American Indian tradition, particularly that of the desert Southwest, it's believed that small imperfections have to be purposefully left in an artwork, or the soul of the artist might become trapped in the piece. The deliberate mistakes are escape routes to keep the work from being too perfect. While I don't really believe that my soul will be trapped by these, I honor that tradition anyway by doing many of the measurements without any kind of a ruler.
In Acorn's piece, you may be able to see that each bee has been aligned by guess and by golly. None are in exactly the same place in their containers. The containers themselves were aligned by eye as well, although I used a software tool to make sure that the north, south, east and west containers are all centered across the disk vertically for the north and south ones, and horizontally for the east and west ones. I used them to guess the spacing for the diagonal containers.
Cool that reminds me of a similar tradition in Buddhist art where they deliberately introduce imperfection and randomness because of the implications in their philosophy.