The Artpart - Stepping Out Building Blocks

by CAROLYN TOLPO SMITH
Sun Columnist

October means a time for travel for many, whether to witness fall foliage off island on the mainland or off to the stadium for the first event of a sports season. Such excursions whether small or large often strike a balance as necessary parts that shape up the whole, forming particular time, season, year, life or era.

Balance fuels an artpart in the Arts as well as everyday life with links to structure and distribution. Explorations in the book, Beauty Secrets for Life, now at www.cafepress/artbeautyshop.com explore deceptively simple elements like balance and others that trek terrain we all experience everywhere, even as we move from place to place, near or far.

Living in fifteenth century Italy, Leonardo Da Vinci noticed structural distributions or placements and settled on balanced relationships seen in form including human beings and objects. Today western artists and others still use the relationships set by the standards of such topography that Leonardo noticed shown in the image here. The Hawaiian language term for setting sail and roaming links remarkably as well to balance, actually heard and seen easily in the spoken and written word:  holoholo. Wayfinding to new horizons or even an evening stroll often map pathways in holoholo trips.

Significance of such movements in a balance to each other become apparent sometimes long after noticing a sense of perhaps a bigger picture and the place such journeys takes in it a sort of stepping out that might act as building blocks.

Art by Carolyn Tolpo Smith of C. Tolpo Studio/Honolulu listed in Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Catalog of American Portraits includes Hawaii State Portrait of Governor John A. Burns. Her book objective at www.cafepress.com/artbeautyshop leads The Artpart columns since 1997. Studio: (808) 395-8455 Website: www.tolpohawaiiart.com.