Throughout nature there is a pattern sometimes called the golden mean.  Medieval monks saw them as an echo of the trinity, evidence of the hand of God.  Monks called this proportion “The Divine Section”.  It’s everywhere in nature and we find it beautiful. More than that, they felt, (and so do I) that it is echoing the nature of the trinity.  There is “three in one” in this pattern. The shorter section is to the longer as the longer is to the whole.  Patterns using this relationship are found at many scales from spiral galaxies to sea shells, the proportions of the human body and the spiral in the double helix of the DNA molecule.

The Fibonacci series of numbers leads to the same proportion and is evident in patterns of growing plants.  Each successive number is the sum of the previous two, leading to rhythmic fractal like patterns.  The Fibonacci series goes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on.  It’s there in the spirals of sunflower seeds and pine cones, and the spiral galaxies. If you Google it, Fibonacci, you’ll find lots of images and math formulas.

Such beauty!  God is amazing!!  In the polyptych art I do with multiple images, I have deliberately used these proportions just as the medeaval monks did with triptych alter screens and diptych book page proportions. It makes me glad.

In the image of tiny wild flax flowers (above), and quite a few others, the pattern is there at different scales.  The proportion of smaller to larger to whole of the images in the picture, the placement of the stems and the heart of the flowers, and even the number of petals and the proportion of petals to flower heart.