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Judith Barath creates art that engages the senses. The rhythmic movements and overlapping shapes throughout her pieces invite the viewer into an exciting and expressive world of art. Her symmetrical art is truly enticing, especially due to the lack of colors and focus on shapes that form creatures within. Art uses symmetry to create balance, harmony, order, and aesthetics. Symmetry is present in the world around us, so our brains are naturally wired to recognize it. Gestalt's human behavior theory explores this phenomenon in great detail. Symmetry or its lack thereof, can produce emotions in the viewer, which an artist takes advantage of when creating art. It can produce calmness, pleasure, commotion, discontentment, and uniqueness. Judith Barath creates symmetry using design techniques that produce creatures and their faces on canvas. Barath's designs are created from familiar objects and recognizable shapes, such as staircases, building structures, beach waves, and tire tracks. But these structural designs generate faces of creatures with facial features and a uniquely eerie quality, making these creations so captivating. The type of symmetry used by Barath is primarily known as Reflection Symmetry. Reflection or bilateral symmetry produces a mirror effect to produce shapes and patterns. Interestingly, faces also tend to be bilateral in nature. This doesn't just include human faces. It also includes faces of bugs and animals, which Barath has skillfully achieved in her art by playing with images and making them come alive. |
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Another factor that is important when considering symmetry is that it is vertical instead of horizontal. It is difficult for the human eye to create patterns of facial features in horizontal symmetries. Barath has kept this factor in mind when producing these images and has kept the central axis of the reflection symmetry vertical.
Additionally, Barath has also used rotational symmetry in her art. This is the effect that creates shapes that seem like eyes to the viewer. Staircases are naturally rotational in nature. Barath has used this inherent quality to generate spooky and ominous designs that draw the eye to the center of the art. The gradual change of color from bright to dark creates a sense of depth as the stairs descend into nothingness.
The contrast of these two themes is indeed amusing and inspiring. Barath generates the facial features of bugs by manipulating structural and architectural designs, indicating the collision of two extremely different themes.
Generally, bugs and other creatures have no place in building structures and are alien to the corporate or industrial world. But Barath has managed to somehow romanticize these two together in her art; one from the world created by man and one from the natural world.
It is the mark of a truly phenomenal artist to create such a union between two inherently opposing themes.
