Originally Posted by
rdenney
I keep looking for single focal points in my woods, but often the texture is too thick for any one thing to declare itself.
I said this in another thread as a joke, but I mean it seriously, too: I look at the work of Eliot Porter. In 1991 or 1992, he collaborated with James Gleick on a words-and-pictures book called "Nature's Chaos" which hits this topic head-on. Much of Porter's work is of woods and underbrush that makes the texture the subject rather than some singular thing. It's pattern-as-subject, even when the pattern is random. This is certainly not a new concept in art.
When I was looking through the book, I was turning around the familiar phrase "can't see the forest for the trees" into: "Can't see the trees for the forest." I don't think I know what it means, though.
Rick "whose property includes about 3500 pine trees" Denney