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ArtlessHmmmm — Skeletal Obsession
Published: 2009-07-23 14:15:30 +0000 UTC; Views: 772; Favourites: 35; Downloads: 0
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Description
Kew Gardens provides for some truly interesting textures and patterns. My current obsessions:1. pictures in square...
2. pattern and symmetry
3. line
and of course my ever continued obsession with colour!
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Comments: 23
Outstanding photo! I love this purity and minimalism!
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why thankyou - i really enjoyed taking this and others on that day (not that i've done anything with any of them! lol should go back really!) Thanks for the 
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thankyou - the square suited it so much better than the original format.
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Lovely! This image just Rocks! Glad I found it! Featured ----> [link]
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aw, thank you soo much!
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Wow Lizzy this is beautiful and vibrant! Great job! Good luck with the contest!
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thanks so much hun - glad to see your still about on the circuit! hope your well.
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Why thank you and for the
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You are quite welcome! 
Susanne K. Langer
...Yet even in the motifs of pure decoration—zigzags and S-curves, parallels and spirals and loops—we find the basic principles of expressiveness, forms that seem to “have life” not because they represent anything living, but because they symbolize directly the sense of life, which underlies all our feelings. In a little book on design3 I find the following statement, made by the artist-author with perfectly literal intent and evidently no consciousness whatever of using metaphor: “Borders must move forward, and grow as they move.”
Now, what does it mean to say a border moves? The border is a mark on a contrasting ground, perfectly stationary. When we draw it, the pencil moves, the line or series of forms actually grows in one direction. But suppose it is not even made in this fashion; suppose it is made all at once, by block-printing. And perhaps we do not see it made at all. Still the border “runs” along the edge of the tablecloth or around the margins of a page. If it is supported by short tangential lines the apparent movement is very much enhanced.
There are, of course, classical explanations of this phenomenon in terms of eye-movements: the eye, it is said, is “carried” along a line as it is in following a moving object, such as a mouse running across the floor, and the association of our eye-movement with moving objects prompts us to impute movement to the line. It is not unlikely that eye-movements do play some part in the illusion, but they do not account for it, for if they were always thus associated we could never appreciate as stationary anything too big to be seen at the focal center, i.e., without moving the eyes. Everything else should appear to shift or mill around. Quite to the contrary, however, we are just as likely to think of actual motion in terms of a fixed form. The mouse running across the floor seems to cover a path that remains there, an imaginary line.
The real connection between lines and motion is, I believe, that an uninterrupted line serves us as a symbol of motion, and conveys the idea of it exactly as any symbol conveys its message. In the direct, intuitive appreciation of what may be termed “natural symbols,”4 the import is received like something inherent in the symbol; therefore the running mouse seems to cover a path lying on the floor, and the still, painted line seems to run. The reason is that both exemplify the abstract principle of direction, by virtue of which they are logically congruent enough to be symbols for one another; and in the ordinary, intelligent use of vision, we let them stand proxy for each other all the time, though we do not know it. This is not a function that is first discursively conceived and then assigned a possible symbol, but is non-discursively exhibited and then perceived long before it is acknowledged in a scientific device (as it is in the language of physics, where vectors are conventionally indicated by arrows). Motion, therefore, is logically related to linear form, and where a line is unbroken, and supporting forms tend to give it direction, the mere perception of it is charged with the idea of motion, which shines through our impression of the actual sense-datum and fuses with it in apperception. The result is a very elementary artistic illusion (not delusion, for, unlike delusion, it survives analysis), which we call “living form.”
This term takes us back to Best-Maugard’s supposedly simple statement (it is addressed to children!) : “Borders should move forward, and grow as they move.” What does “grow” mean in this context? The border does not grow bigger in design. No, but it seems to grow longer, for in its seeming motion it does not vacate the places where it was before; like the imaginary path of the mouse, it covers the ground, but continues in one direction; and an ornamental border design appears to do this by a law of its own.
Artistically, all motion is growth; not growth of things or creatures, but of lines and spaces. The spiral—one of the simple motifs—is a “dynamic” or progressing line, but what really seems to grow is a space, the two-dimensional area it defines. This intimate relation between movement and growth is what makes design—the grammar of visual semblance—“living form,” in a perfectly intelligible sense. It is also the surest refutation of any theory that reduces the experience of movement in design to motions connoted by stimulation of tiny muscular actions in the eye. The term “living form” is justified by a logical connection that exists between a half-illusory datum—the “growing” line or space—and the concept of life, whereby the former is a natural symbol of the latter; for “living form” directly exhibits what is the essence of life—incessant change, or process, articulating a permanent form...
Thank you for reading!!!
Obsessions are, well, excessive.
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wow - no thank you for thinking and connecting up the dots. Movement eh? alot to think on!
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and this has all your obseesions.. lol
great square, colours and lines, Lizzy.
seriously, good detail and focus, hun..
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Thank you kindly! 
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you're welcome, Lizzy.
and it's great to create a piece that you are that proud of.
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