After listening to the lecture on three and how prominent it is in pop culture, daily life and art history, I was inspired to look through my work and photos to identify if I used groups of three. While sorting through photography, digital works, text, and ordinary objects I noticed so many times I’ve subconsciously grouped things in threes.
While traveling I love to visit museums, people watch, and photograph anything that I can use as inspiration, a reference, or just for memory. I’ve had the privilege to visit many galleries, admiring the marble sculptures and large paintings and photographing them to study anatomy. Many pieces I’ve seen portray 3 subjects, posed in interesting dynamic compositions that give the piece more complexity than a solo figure. I included a few I’ve taken photographs of, including The Three Graces, a well known group of goddesses in Greek mythology. Aside from photographing other’s works with sets of three, I’ve also noticed that I tend to set up a composition with three subjects, especially in street photography. When I’m walking in public, I like to observe people doing various tasks or architecture that catches my eye, sometimes taking a photo so I can draw them later, and looking at many of my reference photos, I was shocked to see so many three’s. I never realized how much ordinary objects or structures come in groups of three. Something as simple as the way a train’s interior has a pattern of three seats in a row, then two across the aisle. I never would have even considered looking at furniture in sets of three, without noticing I photographed the three seats together. Along with subject matter, I’ve observed how much I depend on color palettes with three colors. In the cliff side building photo, I not only took a photo of 3 buildings, but each one was a different shade, adding even more depth.
My digital art also includes so many sets of three. For an assignment last fall, we were told to make exquisite corpses, consisting of three final pieces, assembled from three drawings, made from three different mediums, collaged together. I had trouble creating the pieces at first, then assigned each piece a color, which led to them relating to elements in nature. I digitized my final products afterwards, and loved how they looked as a set of three, tied together by the elements: fire, water, and earth. During freshman year, I created a pack of stickers to raise awareness about issues I found important, based on another artist’s color palette and motive of using art to express their beliefs. The color palette was blues, reds, and a beige. Each design I made had a three word slogan on it, that is easy to read, understand and visually appealing. Looking at my other pieces that include text, many of the phrases are also only three words.
Aside from art, while reading other discussion posts I really resonated with the fact that groups of three are not only prominent, but are so significant to some individuals. The number can represent feelings or moments in time, rather than just be a numerical value.
