8×22 grid

1207: Michelangelo’s “Pieta”

| wonko

I am not sure about you, but I cannot imagine the amount of talent packed into a 24 year old Michelangelo when he carved a single block of marble into the breathtaking statue that is “Madonna della Pietà” now housed in the Vatican, Rome.

I know when we visited on holiday in the mid 2010’s I stood transfixed, finding it unbelievable that it was the work of human hands. Few bits of stone are so alive, none convey so viscerally the crushing grief of a mother cradling her murdered son. Many controversaries surrounded the artwork when it was created – the Church wanted to know why the Mother looked younger than the son, many thought the pose too confronting. It is impossible to view the work and not be moved. Pictures do not seem to do it justice.

I stumbled across some re-drawn fold schemes of a very old box pleating model by Neal Elias – designed back in 1979, this proto-box pleating model is a representation of 2 human figures, one cradling the other – he named it “Michelangelo’s Pieta”:

Determined to source the original diagrams, I learned that they were published in a long since unavailable publication “Origami Without Borders QQM4” and later released in a massive collected work anthology called “The Origami World of Neal Elias
by Dave Venables and Marc Cooman” – an astonishing collection of over 1000 designs by Elias and his contemporaries in the 60’s and 70’s, the birth of modern origami. I am determined to acquire a copy if I can.

The premise of the model is simple: on a single duo sheet of paper, use one side to form Mary, the other to fold Jesus, and articulate the two figures so one can lounge on the other. In today’s terms this is challenging but entirely designable via stick figure analysis and use of one of many BP design tools (like Oriedita or BoxPleat Studio). Back in the 1970’s this was completely revolutionary – verging on witchcraft.

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1117: Mod on a Moped

| wonko

When you talk of “box pleating”, the young kids in the origami design sphere seem to think they invented it. I was fishing around on the web, for origami-related things as you do, and stumbled across an astonishing scanned page from Neal Elias’ notebook from 1968 that features box pleating:

This is Neal’s “Boy on a motor scooter” – an amazing proto-design from 1968!!!!! (this is all there is, you have to fill in the gaps – it was his personal notebook, the diagrams were all HE needed to fold the model) but what an historical gem of a design. It is doubly interesting because it was designed 3 years before I began my journey in origami as a wide-eyed, clueless 11 year old.

Further research suggests this page was “ripped” from a BOS Publication Booklet 35 (still in print?) called “Neal Elias Miscellaneous Folds – II “, edited by Dave Venables. I have purchased the previous Neal Elias volume but was unaware this treasure exists – it has prototypes of some very famous and completely revolutionary designs indeed (like “The Last Waltz”).

Back in the “early” days of western origami, Elias was a pioneer, realising that by gridding a sheet of paper, then using gridlines and 45 degree connectors you could pleat astonishingly complex structures that could then be shaped into complex figurative models. As a kid, the few models I had access to from him were like crack to me. I mastered the “Elias stretch” (these days I think they call it a ‘pythagorean stretch’) and “Elias base”, making skiers and knights in armor, all from squares.

Many of his designs use odd shaped paper – this model uses an 8×22 grid, and the colour change base is particularly wonderful, leaving all the bits of a person in one colour and a lovely long pleat bundle of alternate colour emerging from him. I can see so much potential of all sorts of things here.

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