THE GOLDEN MEAN

I never understood the golden mean and how in the world it was connected to this Fibonacci spiral that we always hear about. Then one night in bed it dawned on me.
1,1,2,3,5,8,13, 21… and so on…make a 1×1 square, add a another beside it, then add another to the long side of the resulting rectangle, and on, and on, you come up with squares whose dimensions form the Fibonacci sequence. All well and good. But what’s it got to do with this “golden mean” thing? And so I did some math in my head with those Fibonacci numbers. I’ve heard it also called the Golden ratio, and a ratio is just a fraction, which is just division, so it went…1/1= 1, 1/2=0.5, 2/3+0.667, 3/5=0.6, 5/8=0.625And the pattern emerges, dividing each number in the sequence by the next seems to approach a number… maybe 0.61 something or other. I’m not trying to teach a lesson here, just explaining the thought process that went through my head that night in bed. I woke up the next morning and looked up the golden mean- it’s 0.61803398875…HA! That felt pretty good. I get it now. So these paintings were all sorta made with the Golden Mean used in determining compositional placements. In fact I loosely use this all the time. It’s unreal. Math is amazing.