Contemporary still life tangram paradox and flowers

Contemporary still life Tangram paradox and flowers

It’s been already November, as I’ve brought a small bouquet of late fall flowers, some pink baby roses, from the garden to my studio. I’ve put the flowers in a white vase on the table. Just to make me happy. I’ve been working hard on my Ostia Antica landscape painting series. Yet there, on the table, just near the pink bouquet, has been also an old wooden tangram puzzle in bold colors, who knows by which coincidence. Sublime petals of late autumn flowers have been in shades of pink, in a way belonging more to the past summers than to that November day. Yet they have strangely corresponded to the strong vivid colors of the geometric shapes of the puzzle near by. It ‘s been like watching at two worlds at once, like at impressionism and cubism, if you want. Or poetry and math. Or dreams and reality. And, paradoxically, it’s worked together perfectly well.

Tangram paradox

Tangram paradox: A dissection fallacy discovered by Dudeney (1958). The same set of tangram pieces can apparently produce two different figures, one of which is a proper subset of the other. This seems true only at a first glance: in reality the area is the same in both cases, since in the left picture the missing foot is compensated by a larger body. from:
Barile, Margherita. “Tangram Paradox.” From MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource, created by Eric W. Weisstein. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/TangramParadox.html