Material of the Natural World
Wild Nature as Found Object
I found it fascinating that the Chinese solution to sculpting or representing nature is not to recreate it, but rather to isolate a small part of it. The scholar rocks are only a tiny piece of nature, but within them is a truer representation of nature in its entirety than any man-made object could provide. Nature echoes itself, within itself. What was even more interesting to me was that ideologically, the Chinese would never even consider portraying nature in any other way. For a model of nature, the Chinese choose to use “the object of nature as itself, rather than the image.” Once I had thought about it a little, I realized doing so made perfect sense. I can understand a scholar wanting to surround himself with little “excerpts” from nature as he works, just as I understand why I like to fill me work space with plants, and light from large windows. If my eye has nothing beautiful or organic to rest on within a space, I actually find myself feeling quite lost. The plants on my desk and in my window provide me with both inspiration and a sense of calm, in some sort of unexplainable way. It is just like the author said: a scholars’ rock “is a little piece of a wrinkle from which you can imagine the whole wrinkle.” With the few plants around me, I can imagine being outside, even when I am stuck in, and I am immediately happy.
A Trip to the Chinese Scholar Rock Collection
15 words:
tempest, twist, wave, bulbous, curve, gnarled, notch, undulating, mountain, swirl, ancient, flowing, growth, solid, cliff, chasm
Upon entering the Chinese Furniture Exhibit, I was immediately shocked by how quiet, and deserted, the galleries were on a rainy Thursday night. I had inadvertently entered through the back door, and no guard had notice my entrance. The rooms were airy, but stuff in their emptiness, at the same time. As I ambled through looking for a rock to draw, I must have triggered a sensor of some sort, because very suddenly, the eerie twangs of China began to play around me. I have to admit to being oddly creeped out. But I continued through, and centered myself in front of the rock I eventually decided to observe and draw. It was such an unusual object for me, not something I would have spent time with if not for this assignment. My usual self would have gone for the intricately beautiful carved details on the vessels in the exterior hallway. But the rocks were what we had to look for, so I looked, and I found one. Once I got to drawing, I really enjoyed the object. Although I actually saw a lot of depth in the crevices and niches it contained, my drawings came out quite planar–very much like the way my drawings of a rock, or an entire mountain, in a landscape usually come out. I found it interesting that I was subconsciously approaching this little sample of nature the very same way I would usually approach nature. My trip to the MFA was an intriguing one.
