[ DATE ] · Ancient Canons · by Stephen Meakin
Stephen described his mission as weaving together four key components: "The spirit of ancient Insular (Island) Arts, the great Rose Windows of Medieval Europe, the Art of Persian Geometry and the Sacred Mandala of Tibet."
This painting holds two of those four in the same frame simultaneously.
Persian geometric art reached its peak between the 9th and 14th centuries in mosques, madrasas and palaces across Iran, Central Asia and Moorish Spain. In 2007, physicists studying the Alhambra in Granada discovered that medieval Islamic geometers had constructed quasi-crystalline patterns with five-fold symmetry — patterns Western mathematics had only formally described in the 1970s. They knew, through craft and geometric intuition, five centuries before Western science caught up.
Stephen studied this tradition for years — learning the ancient construction methods from illuminated manuscripts found in a Bournemouth library, later travelling to Petra in Jordan, standing inside the buildings these geometries were made to inhabit.
The Flower of Life — carved at Abydos, studied by Leonardo, at the heart of his Transformation mandala two decades earlier — here meets Persian geometric craft directly. The circular overlapping structure of the Flower of Life held within the angular interlaced lattice of girih tilework: warm amber and gold against deep blue, the colours of Persian tilework and pottery — lapis, cobalt, ochre — carried from the 13th century into this. Two ancient traditions, each complete in itself, each discovering the same underlying order from a different direction.