There was this nagging question I had as a high school student. It was, “How do you divide a circle into 60 equal arcs?” No one I asked knew, not even my geometry teacher, though she encouraged me to find out. It came about because I saw the analog clock on the wall adjacent to the blackboard in both Geometry and World History class. This was a 1962.
It took awhile to solve. I accomplished a solution about 15 years into this current century. The solution required the fullness of thinking, not obsessively but of opportune moments which seemed to relate in some way.
“Dome of Heaven” is a celebration of that solution. 60 is a hold over from the Babylonians. We still measure our sky in hours, minutes and seconds they did too. The two ideas, of circle division and the broad expanse of the night sky come together for me in conceiving this image.
