While visiting in Chicago, I was fortunate enough to visit and photograph The Chicago Botanical Gardens. It's an amazing place, filled with horticultural delights. The extensive rose gardens create a sensual landscape of colors, textures, and aromas that would inspire any perfume designer. Wonderful vignettes of pathways, trellies and decorative walls. I highly recommend a visit.
However, I was glad to get back to the wilds of the DW Field in Brockton. After making a comparison between the two by exploring the differences through my painting of small intimate scenes , I was surprised that I found myself more inspired by the natural, i.e. weedy areas of the park.
It dawned on me that the benign neglect in the untended areas allowed me to discover something not calculated by the sophisticated designs.Please don't misunderstand, I love gardens, to me they represent one of the many creative expressions
of cultural attainment. After watching the astronauts eating oak leaf lettuce on the space station, one begins to imagine great floating crystal palaces filled with Earth's most beautiful flowers and shrubs. I think of the long history of man's relationship to cultivation designs.
Let's imagine the first garden, the Garden of Eden. How does this make us feel? What does it represent?
Now create in your mind The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Can you imagine the wonder of entering this lush space in the middle of a desert? Or can you envision the gardens at Samarkand? Or maybe the gardens at the Chateau de Versailles?
And this is the crux of my explanation,
gardens are a reflection of the human mind except perhaps for Eden, which in it's original intent still excludes the chaos of nature.The unruliness is novelty.It's a chance to see new perceptions that are formed by relationships we're still trying to understand. These last four paintings are from DW Field. I'm profoundly excited by spaces and lines that might have been seen by other artists but I am seeing them for the first time and it is not designed by a human hand. It seems as if I'm peeling away veils to sneak a peek at something beyond us and there's a gratefulness for the chance.
The Hudson River School saw the Divine in the vast landscapes of the wilderness and I see the Sublime in the smallest of worlds. They seem to open for an instance and I hope I can capture the feeling of having witnessed something extraordinarily precious.
And every time I revisit a scene, there is a revealing of a grace not manipulated for a hurriedly copied blueprint. My fear is that someday we'll only be left with a miniaturization of the natural world for that's all we will believe that we're worthy of experiencing.
Can we truly calculate the loss when we've been reduced
to a world that is only our reflection?
andrea and i are going to give you paint supply presents more often. keep up the good work. -k
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