Landscape with Chair and Bench

A patch of dirt, a place to sit, a structure over one's head. Do these not constitute a garden? Most certainly, I say.

Perhaps it has become a cliche these days to opine that a garden is a state of mind. Yet here it is - an elegant pergola rests partially on a sawhorse and a chair. The chair seems to have been upended for the nonce, but benches sing with the colors of growth, and the scent of earthy mulch twitches the senses. Overhead floods and spots deconstruct into intriguing shadows on the ground.

All this, in the midst of a wintry month, is nothing if not a welcome sight.



Jim Osman's installation is on exhibit at the Brooklyn campus of the Long Island University Humanities Gallery (first floor Humanities Building, gallery hours 9-6,) till the end of February.
http://www.brooklyn.liu.edu/depts/art/pages/humanities_gallery.htm

Nature in Culture - Part 2: The Flowers and The Foliage

Still looking at architecture at The Cloisters, one finds, among many others, another Medieval interpretation of one of nature's most basic forms: the stylized forms of flowers mostly compositae in format: flower petals radiating from a central flat disk. This is the flower we all drew as children when asked to draw a flower. In yet another capital to a column, this one located in The Cloisters' Pontaut Chapter House, we see a column with this unusual capital.

The classical Greek orders don't generally feature flower forms. The primary form of the graceful capital in Corinthian Order derives from the acanthus leaf. (See my post on this subject from Sept. 21, 2008.) The Middle Ages witnessed an influx of garden and nature motifs in paintings, woven tapestries, and artifacts from jewelry to architectural ornamentation.

Water lilies (picture on right,) and lotuses in ponds, coneflowers, tibouchinas (see below,) and sunflowers are only a few examples of the compositaes that are the basis of the five or six petaled images so dominant in our collective consciousness when we think of flowers.

Nature in Culture - Part 1: The Grapes

(above photo, obtained, uncredited from the internet)

Frank Lloyd Wright - not an impartial observer - called Architecture the "Mother Art." But then, we are all aware that artists have always looked to forms in nature for inspiration. And in architecture, one might riff off Wright and say that nature is Mother's milk.

Any skeptic's doubt can be countered with an injunction to look at this capital on one of the double columns surrounding an enclosed garden at The Cloisters, the museum in northern Manhattan which houses a large portion of the Metropolitan Museum's Medieval Art collections. The building that comprises The Cloisters incorporates the Museum's collection of architectural fragments from five distinct medieval French cloisters. Three gardens designed around these medieval colonnades hew closely to horticultural principles and concepts gleaned from literary and art historical treatises from the Middle Ages.

One need not be a literalist. But it is hard to resist posting an illustration via this dramatic darkling shot of Vitis coignetiae, the ornamental grape vine, otherwise known as the Glory Bower vine.

Or the sun-drenched fruits in the lead-in photograph of grapes above.

Little Red Greenhouse

The piece shown above, Little Red Greenhouse, will be shown in the

Küf/Mold 2008 Exhibition in Gent, Belgium

(check out link to Kuf/Mold blog on left.)

Because the piece had to travel from Brooklyn to Gent, only one of the two "little red greenhouses," a red Plexiglass box, 14-1/2"h x 10"w x 10"l, with seams polished to neon brightness will be shown. Plants will be bought and installed locally by the show's curators Suzan Batu, Bill Doherty and Marijke Bontinck.