The Intersection Of Maths & Art | Davary Walia

I remember my childhood art mainly as me painting secretly. My friends probably would have been the first to run out of the door after school, but I was quite happy to stay in and sit by the window with a pencil and a sketchpad. No matter if the outside world was loud, disordered, and unpredictable, I just let painting be my world. There was really no time when I was so immersed in colors, brushstrokes, and tiny details that usually go unnoticed that I could easily lose track of time for 10 hours and not realize how quickly time had flown by. In a way, this was like rule less meditation. Painting was certainly never just a simple hobby for me. Instead, it was a blend of therapy, self-expression, and peace. It is just like my safe place.

However, growing up, quite surprisingly, I discovered that there was a link between the colorful world of my paints and another realm that I would not have imagined at all, maths. The realization didn't come to me all at once. It was a gradual thing, really, when I recognized that I was unconsciously placing the centre of my sketches, balancing colours on the opposite sides, or modifying a shape until it felt right. That feeling right was not at all a coincidence; it was proportion, symmetry, and geometry that were at work silently. In a way, without even realizing it, through every artwork I was making a quiet math equation.

Take, for example, perspective drawing, in which everything revolves around geometry. The shadows that make a painting come alive are based on angles and light intensity. Even the composition of a canvas follows ratios like the famous golden ratio that artists and architects have used for centuries. The color wheel is basically a circle divided by degrees, where complementary colours lie opposite to each other, just like points on a coordinate plane.

Then it dawned on me, maths is not just the stuff of solving equations or remembering formulas. It's all about patterns, balance, and logic, the very elements that bring art to life. Math structures creativity, and creativity breathes emotion into math. Looking at math through an artist's eyes made me think of the subject less as a cold, mechanical process and more as something ... human, in a way. For instance, the precision of an equation reminded me of the discipline one needs to make a perfect brush stroke. The symmetry of geometric shapes was like the harmony of a well-balanced composition. Even the charts started to look like abstract art pieces to me, each line telling a different story.

Art taught me patience, the kind of patience you need to stay with a problem until you understand it. Whereas Math has taught me clarity, the kind of clarity with which you can breathe life into an idea without letting chaos take over. The two arts, painting and Maths, require a combination of focus, imagination and trust in the process.

In painting, one single wrong stroke can change everything. But it also happens that the mistake touches the secret of something beautiful. Maths works similarly; a mistake can lead you astray, but it can also mean the discovery of a new path.

These totally different ways of learning allow you to discover things, to ask questions, to change, and to do things over again when necessary.

I've been gradually convinced that perhaps writing and math are basically the same thing, both fundamentally dealing with the conversion of disorder into order, one maybe through colours and shapes, the other through numbers and patterns.

Both of them give us a deeper understanding of the world.

So, every time I find myself facing a blank canvas or a complicated math problem, I use the same method: I look at both of them with curiosity, serenity and a kind of quiet confidence that, little by little, really beautiful things will be born, line after line.

It turned out to be painting, which gave me the sensitivity to grasp maths, and the maths that helped me find the art in the paintings.

They have proved to me that creativity and logic are not two opposites but rather two partners in the same never, ending dance of discovery.

~Davary Walia