Corona and Six Suns over the Teton Range

I am a retired professor of mathematics from the University of Oregon. For the past seventeen years I have been carving contemporary abstract sculpture, primarily of stone. My goal is to provide viewers a meditative and calming experience:

I hope to elicit a viewer’s feelings, rather than thoughts, with a soothing response to harmony, coherence, and flow, in short, rhythm. I believe that experiencing visual rhythm can be therapeutic. In this way, I offer shape therapy or sculptural art for well-being.

Each stone represents a particular slice of the geological history of the earth, and gives me an opportunity to complete a work of art that is 500 million to over a billion years in the making.

In this forum I plan to provide series of selected works from my collection (www.rhythminstone.com) that I hope will prove therapeutic. But before I begin that series next week, I want to honor a work of rhythmic art that began with a big-bang 13 billion years ago. This art was not of my making, as I refer to the August 21, 2017, Solar Eclipse available along a wide strip of the continental United States.

The image below gives my interpretation of that solar eclipse as viewed from Idaho (western) side of the Teton Range. This is a composite image in which I ignored all the laws of planetary motion and put the ingredients where-ever I wanted. It was an awesome event:

"Corona and Six Suns over the Tetons"

I took the photographs that I incorporated in this composite from a location between the towns of Tetonia and Driggs in Teton Valley, Idaho. It shows the less photographed western side of the Teton Mountain Range, giving a view called the "Four Peaks." From left to right, the four peaks are Mount Owen (12,928 feet (3,940 m)), Grand Teton(13,775 feet (4,199 m)), Middle Teton(12,804 feet (3,903 m)) and South Teton (12,514 feet (3,814 m)).

Here is the Teton Range as I viewed it last winter from the east side in Jackson Hole, WY:

"Teton Range from Jackson Hole, WY"

(Both images copyrighted © 2017 products of Al Sieradski.)

None of my own sculptural works can top that solar display or mountain view, so my planned series is destined to go downhill. Nevertheless, perhaps you will join me for my next submission.

Al Sieradski
Eugene, OR
USA