Andy Goldsworthy is a genius. I cant think of another late 20th century artist whose work is so enormously accessible and so hugely rewarding. In "A Collaboration with Nature," Goldsworthy shows us the miracles he has wrought with the simplest materials he finds in front of him: mere stones, water, leaves, branches, mud, and thorns, all "found objects," become the sundry mediums through which Goldsworthy works his visual sorcery.Just a few of dozens of high points in the book:
- A graceful circle on the ground, created with brown leaves on the outer perimeter, warming to red, then orange, then yellow leaves toward the center;
- A "slate crack line" created when Goldsworthy carefully arranged pieces of slate so that the edges formed a seeming "crack" in the pile;
- Three "statues" made of balanced ovoid rocks in the middle of a snow-covered stream, each appearing to be something like well-rounded Giacomettis;
- A snowball eerily suspended in and supported by the trees which surround it;lt;P>- A rectangle of snow, in the middle of which Goldsworthy has carefully carved concentric, successively shallower circles so that the light gleams from the center but gets dimmer and dimmer with each larger circle;
- A sycamore branch placed on a bed of snow, juxtaposed with the same sycamore branch stripped of bark and placed on a bed of leaves--the first is dark against white, and the second is white against dark;
- An arching series of ice triangles, each of which has been painstakingly stuck to the next and balanced on a moss-covered rock--this looks almost like a glass wing of some sort.
I could go on and on by covering every single page in the book, but Ill leave it to you to find out for yourself what a visual feast Goldsworthy provides for the eyes--and what interesting mental exercise he provides for the mind of the observant viewer.
