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The Art and Science of Barbara PageDrawings |
"We dream. We falter. We fail. We flail. We fly." |
We dream. We falter. We fail. We flail. We fly.
I found a small photograph of my father wearing knickers and standing on a split rail fence with arms widespread to support wings he had constructed from strips of wood and bed sheets. It records the moment of anticipation before his maiden flight. He crashed and never did learn to fly but I did.
A few years ago my father gave me his engineering tools and drafting paper. I began using French curves to design wings on the translucent vellum sheets stamped with title blocks. My conception of flying is a combination of Bernoulli’s Theorem and magic. Science and its counterpart, mythology, are frequent sources of my imagery.
On some of the sheets of vellum I found my father’s original plans for industrial facilities. In the “Double Vision” series his drawings serve as an underlay for my superimposed designs of early flying machines that never got off the ground…the stuff of broken dreams. As the series evolves, his industrial mechanisms are increasingly incorporated into more successful aeronautical designs. The realization of dreams depends on nuts and bolts.
The Flights of Fancy series draws on my classical studies. With technical precision, I design wings for creatures from mythological and religious canons endowed with the capacity for flight. The Greeks gave us Pegasus and Christian dogma the hierarchy of angels to populate the heavens. Inventing superheroes appears to be a perennial human trait.
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Updated on 04 June, 2008.
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