[ Lost in the Landscape ]

getty garden, light and shadow

I try to stop by Robert Irwin’s Cen­tral Gar­den at the Getty Cen­ter when­ever I’m nearby. This early august day was bright but cool, a per­fect day for a stroll through the gar­den to see what new things I’d find.

If you’ve never been to the gar­den, it divides into two large parts: a cen­tral bowl hold­ing a maze of two col­ors of clipped aza­leas and its sur­round­ing plant­i­ngs, and, above it, a straight water­course that is shaded all along its length by Lon­don plane trees, a cousin of the Amer­i­can sycamore.

This trip I was con­cen­trat­ing on how the idea of light and shadow, dark and light played out in the over­all design and plantings.

To expe­ri­ence the upper water­course, you fol­low a path that zigzags back and forth. It takes you in and out of the shade and shel­ter of the trees, let­ting you expe­ri­ence the bright Los Ange­les sun­light and how it con­trasts with the dap­pled light the trees pro­vide in the spring, sum­mer and fall.

The water­course, the shel­tered core of this top gar­den, changes from a noisy stream with large stones in its path at the top, to a water­way that glides qui­etly over a tex­tured streambed down below.

The effect of the dap­pled sun­light is repeated in the plant­i­ngs. Dark, almost black-leaved, plants alter­nate with light-colored ones. In this photo it’s almost hard to dis­tin­guish the alter­nat­ing light and shadow of the trees above from the dap­pled plant­i­ngs below. It’s a lit­tle con­fus­ing, a tad dis­ori­ent­ing. And if you’re fas­ci­nated with the effects of light and shadow as I am, you might find it a qui­etly thrilling experience.

Even this lit­tle detail, a plant­ing of suc­cu­lents, plays with con­trasts, light and dark. It’s a lit­tle cor­ner that would look great in a home gar­den, and here it fur­ther helps to rein­force the vibra­tions of light and dark in the upper garden.

When I first saw the gar­den I thought the plant­i­ngs were a lit­tle chaotic. All this light and dark, all this con­tin­ual con­trast­ing of col­ors and plant shapes seemed rest­less. Small doses would look great as perky lit­tle con­tainer plant­i­ngs, but it seemed way too much of a good thing. It seemed like a lit­tle Eng­lish cot­tage gar­den doped up on steroids.

But I’ve been chang­ing my mind. All this crazi­ness rein­forces the intense vibra­tion of con­trasts that you expe­ri­ence walk­ing the zigzag path.

Once you make your way out of the upper por­tion of the gar­den you’re set free into the rel­a­tive calm of the lower bowl. There’s no more zigzag­ging in and out of the shade, there’s no more quick shift­ing from light to dark. Still, the sunken design of the lower gar­den ensures that one of the sides will expe­ri­ence shade dur­ing most of the day. And the plant­i­ngs down here, still alter­nat­ing dark and light, tell you that you’re still in the same garden.

Yes, each trip here I see some­thing new. But I also real­ize that mak­ing this kind of gar­den hap­pen is such an extreme com­mit­ment of resources and labor.

I haven’t quite fig­ured out a way to pho­to­graph the cap­i­tal out­lay it takes to keep this gar­den look­ing great. But I’d like to end this post with a trib­ute to the heroes, those ded­i­cated gar­den­ers who make this place a gar­den worth vis­it­ing sev­eral times a year.

Thanks, guys!

August 07 2010 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • light and shadow • Robert Irwin | 8 Comments »

garden designer, artist

Any rabid gar­den enthu­si­ast vis­it­ing Los Ange­les will prob­a­bly want to put Robert Irwin’s Cen­tral Gar­den at the J. Paul Getty Museum on their list of places to visit. I’ve writ­ten about it a few times, includ­ing [ here ] and [ here ], and so have a lot of other blog­gers. Robert Irwin is also involved in an instal­la­tion of palm trees at the Los Ange­les County Museum of Art.

The garden-making is a fairly recent addi­tion to the projects of this amaz­ing artist. Before tak­ing on bio­log­i­cal mate­ri­als he cre­ated a rich body of work that plays with sub­tle ways you per­ceive light and space. Yes­ter­day I had a chance to visit a show of some work in progress to see what he’s doing these days.

To look at this image to the left you’d maybe swear that this is a paint­ing of stripes. But step into the gallery and you real­ize that these works are actu­ally made out of evenly spaced flu­o­res­cent tubes, each of which has been wrapped in gels to mod­ify their color and to pro­vide lin­ear pat­terns on the face of the bulbs. Most of Irwin’s art uses sim­ple tech­niques like this, but the more you look, the more you get pulled into them.

The effects are so sub­tle pho­tos can’t really do com­plete jus­tice to the pieces. But the pho­tog­ra­pher, Philipp Scholz Rit­ter­mann, one of our local really tal­ented cam­era guys, has made a beau­ti­ful interpretation.

You can see the ver­ti­cal lines of the tubes, the lines of the dark gels, the sub­tle col­ors the tubes cast onto the fix­tures and the spaces between them, and the del­i­cate shad­ows of the fix­tures. The tubes, the gels, the fix­tures, the shadows–everything works together to give you a qui­etly rhyth­mic progression.

If I’m remem­ber­ing the help­ful gallery folks cor­rectly, each piece has four dif­fer­ent states, with dif­fer­ent bulbs being on at dif­fer­ent times. One of the big themes of the Getty gar­den is change–which really isn’t some­thing you have to explain to a gardener–and these new pieces play with how dif­fer­ent the same arrange­ment of bulbs appears as you turn some bulbs on and off.

Take a look at my gar­den photo at the top of this post, and look how the cen­tral top­i­aries of two kinds of clipped aza­leas uses the sub­tly dif­fer­ent leaf and flower col­ors to cre­ate inter­locked for­ma­tions. Next, look at one of the flu­o­res­cent bulb pieces and notice the sub­tle inter­plays of light and shadow that make up the work. It’s the same basic prin­ci­ple, but applied to wildly dif­fer­ing mate­ri­als. As the plants in the gar­den go in and out of bloom, as the sea­sons change, the rela­tion­ship of the for­ma­tions shifts. Same goes for what hap­pens when some bulbs are on and oth­ers blacked out.

I don’t often leave an exhibit thrilled and tin­gling, but this time I did. If you can make it to the exhi­bi­tion at Quint Con­tem­po­rary Art in La Jolla, go quick, before the show closes May 1. Or if you’ll be in New York in the fall, I believe I heard cor­rectly that there’ll be a show of this work at the Pace Gallery.

April 11 2010 | Categories: art | Tags: light and shadow • Robert Irwin | 7 Comments »