Rhyme Paysage

The thought went some­thing like this: I noticed that the images I liked most had in com­mon a field con­di­tion. And when I tried to decide what that was, I came up with the fol­low­ing tech­ni­cal checklist: 

-rep­e­ti­tion in mul­ti­ple dimensions

-irreg­u­lar or elu­sive pattern

-seems to reg­is­ter oth­er forces

-brings togeth­er dis­tinct ele­ments but keeps them separate

-rela­tion­ships between dis­tinct ele­ments give rise to an over­all impression

-resem­bles in some way an actu­al field

A Gee’s Bend quilt, a Man­ny Far­ber paint­ing, an ambi­ent album cov­er, a New Peren­ni­al plant­i­ng: they all had these things in com­mon. And when I looked at them, I would read into the com­po­si­tion ideals that may or may not have been intend­ed: democ­ra­cy, or thrift, or real­ism, or real­ly just the ide­al behind all of those that for some rea­son I cher­ish the most, that all things are basi­cal­ly equal in impor­tance, and if you only saw them that way some­thing mys­ti­cal would happen.

So once again, I brought in the first-year grad­u­ate stu­dents in our pro­gram to help me inves­ti­gate. I rea­soned to them: to make such field con­di­tions work in four-dimen­sion­al space, we would have to be care­ful in fram­ing our dimen­sions. Too small, and there would be no field; too large, and the field would only over­whelm. Framed poor­ly, the field would be exclu­sive, one more ran­dom object among oth­er ran­dom objects; framed well, the field would invite in oth­ers, peo­ple or birds or swal­low­tails, to join it. If the field could be per­ceived as a mean­ing­ful pat­tern from a win­dow, from the air, from a side­walk, it would encour­age them to cross that frame, col­laps­ing the dif­fer­ence between out­side and inside.

Now, if you are think­ing that what is good to one per­son in two dimen­sions might not trans­fer clean­ly to what is good for the com­mu­ni­ty in four dimen­sions – or that the whole con­cept seems a lit­tle abstract for stu­dents who are still learn­ing how to draw, plant, and grade land­scapes – at this point, I am inclined to agree with you. And as much as I would like to put the aes­thet­ic in front of the social and the envi­ron­men­tal, you can see why time demands that it be left to instinct and imi­ta­tion, in this of all dis­ci­plines. But it is an ill wind etc., etc., and you can see here a selec­tion of some of the great deeds they did.