4. The Art of the Crop Circle

I was really starting to enjoy the creative aspect of what I was doing. Initially, When I felt that urgent desire to get the 96 formation onto a stone as quickly as possible, my only means at the moment was to look at the image on my monitor and actually draw it the old fashioned way - and then using that sketch as reference, draw it again the next day onto a masked rock. This went against twenty plus years of conditioning as a professional artist. When it comes to projects that require speed and accuracy, we typically use modern tools such as printers projectors and plotters. Time is money and the competitive nature of our society dictates how we approach our work. The unfortunate result can be a disconnection with why we are artists in the first place. I'm thankful though that our printer was out of ink that day because, being forced to draw it meant that I was made to study it completely.

Speaking of studying it completely; The observation that has been made about the inverse opposite relationship of the Roswell Rock and the 96 formation is incorrect. It is true that the design on the rock is positive while the one in the field is negative, but to function as opposites they would need to be mirror images. For example, If you press your hands together, palm facing palm, then open them like a book, you can see that they are mirror opposites - the thumb of the left hand is left of its palm while the thumb of the right hand is on the right. Looking at the comparison photos of the rock and the field formation, you can see that they are like two left hands.

To draw one of these correctly, the proportions have to be taken in with an almost chess-like mentality - thinking several moves ahead. The more you look, the more you find connectedness between all of the design's elements. It was a simple form really, entirely made from circles and parts of circles, but as the eye, hand, and mind work together to find just the right placements and alignments, the cleverness of the design sings right out, loud and harmoniously.

The energy of the experience lured me into the vastness that is crop circle design. For several weeks I went from one formation to the next, drawing them by hand and finding the creative pathways and I felt I was walking in the footsteps of an artistic giant or giant(s). I learned things I could never have learned on my own. For example, I found that an equilateral triangle can be made within a circle by boxing in the circle, and then by dividing the box into 16 smaller boxes, the points of the triangle will fall where the lines of the boxes intersect with the line of the circle.

Inspired by all I was learning, I decided it would be fun and challenging to try to come up with my own design for the one rotational stone that I had found. Three basic things contributed to what I came up with.

1. I wanted it to be like a symbolic instruction manual for spinning the stone.

2. I also wanted it to be a design that would look good while spinning.

3. There were three strong pull points on the rock that I wanted to emphasize.



So basically it needed to be a triangular circle-ish spiral pictogram thing. In retrospect I think the design I ended up with was “OK” in that it had all those things, but what it definitely did not have was that mystical harmony that I was seeing in the crop circles. Eventually, I began to appreciate more and more that much of the power people often perceive in the designs, is directly attributable to geometry itself. Playing with circles and lines will lead you to coincidence after coincidence, pattern-work that just… happens. Formation designers must certainly learn very quickly, that the more adept they become with the mathematics of what they are doing, the more meaningful the designs begin to look.


Back on the board I posted a picture of the resulting stone and video of it spinning and thought that it would surely suffice and that maybe I was done.



(Continued with 5. The Investigators)