Savant Art : George Widener

 All through his life George Widener has been fascinated with calendars.

“Other kids lined toys up in a row,” he said. “I lined up dates.”

Yet his fixation with calendars has ultimately turned him into a celebrated artist whose striking paintings of numbers, cities, maps and machines have been exhibited all around the world

Widener’s work lets us envisage the world as a savant does. One of his more recent interests is magic squares , which are squares of numbers such that each line, each column and each diagonal adds up to the same number.

For example, in the piece above, the top line is 23 + 6 + 19 + 2 + 15 = 65, and the first column is 23 + 4 + 10 + 11 + 17 = 65.

^^ Source picture above : http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2013/jun/17/mathematics

A more detailed view of this magic square :

^^^    http://www.artspace.com/george_widener/magic_square

^^^ http://accidentalmysteries.blogspot.be/2009/01/george-weidner-calculations-and-numbers.html

Above my absolute favourite drawing made by Widener  : a list of all airplanes crashing on a Sunday ! He writes in his own words on this drawing ( upper left corner ) : ” Some people go to church on Sunday and some get in an airplane . Sometimes both of them end up praying at the exact same second because the plane is going to crash ” ( If you go to the link and click on this particular image over there  , you will get in a new window a much bigger and better picture of it )

Here are some very good quality videos about Widener :

http://science.discovery.com/video-topics/brain-intelligence/ingenious-minds-george-widener.htm

More drawings on :

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/03/the-amazing-art-of-disabled-artists/

Here in this post , I let Wikipedia make all the effort to explain what Savant Syndrome is :

https://alleswatis.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/art-made-by-savant-artists/

 

 

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