Art Sales and Research is presenting a selected group of drawings by the late math genius and self-taught artist, Harold Granucci, in a short two week show.

Harold Granucci (1916-2007) completed his four-year college degree in three years at Quinnipiac College in the 1930s. He worked for Wallace Silversmith's as an accountant and then opened his own accounting practice in the late 1940's. In 1953 he opened a furniture store in Wallingford, Connecticut. His ledgers and journals were like works of art, they were so detailed and meticulously written in pencil. Harold retired in 1979 and acquired a Texas Instruments calculator as a premium from a local bank. He began to use it for various calculations and one thing led to another and soon he was back to his early love of geometry and mathematics.

The drawings that we see today are the result of the next twenty years of calculation and experimentation. Each one required many mathematical calculations to determine where points should be located on a circle or in relation to other points. Then Harold had to determine how to connect the points. The resulting beautiful patterns that emerged were often surprises to him at the beginning but as his skills improved (in his 70s and 80s!) he began to consider the beauty of the result and also added color to enhance the aesthetics.

Harold liked to work with classical shapes such as the "golden rectangle" and the "golden triangle" and many of his works were formed by the overlaying of these shapes and others in carefully calculated processes. One of his favorite pieces was the "Planets" in which he used the actual density of the planets of our solar system to determine how to space the lines in the drawing of the same-sized planets around the sun. His logic in this was that the actual comparative sizes of the planets would have made the drawing less interesting from a geometrical perspective. He also became interested in various ancient symbols such as the yin and the yang and the yoga symbols and incorporated these into many of his later works.

During this same period, Harold designed and created many wooden instruments which he believed could trisect any angle. He was determined to disprove the ancient theory that it is not possible to trisect certain angles. We are not sure if he was successful but he fully believed that his instruments did just that.

During the twenty-plus years since he retired at age sixty-five, this man with a genius for numbers and geometry created hundreds of works of brilliance and art. Imagine drawing the last line across a field of nearly four thousand lines of six different colors and keeping your hand steady! Harold did just that over and over.