mel brewster art

Me, Myself, and Marta

This assignment was about Radial Balance, with a focus on learning more about the relationship between figure and ground as well as experimenting with repetition. The parameters given were that we could use only one letter of our choosing, that we were to use it in three varied sizes, and that our final piece must be radially balanced.

I used the letter “M” for my project. I went through a couple different iterations of the letter before I found what I was looking for – I really wanted to be able to both create the star from the empty space above the tops of the big M’s that you see near the center and also for the bottoms of the M’s to be able to overlap without the curled ends sticking out beyond the flower-type shapes that you see when the tops are facing in toward each other.

The inspiration for the name of the piece came from my childhood years spent with my cousin Marta. Both of our names began with the letter M, we were only a year apart, and we were inseparable for much of our earliest memories – much like the overlapping letters in this piece.