Kansas Day 5

I have a friend who is studying classical architecture at Notre Dame. Every time I get an email, excitement and a bit of jealously creeps in. What would it be like to be in studio with people who are converted and absorbed by the idea of creating beauty through landscapes and buildings?! Makes me sigh with a smile.

Clayton sends thoughts, ideas, quotes, and electronic files of his watercolors that makes my mouth water! It makes this workshop seem rather elementary and naive. Maybe that's not fair and ML would be disappointed to hear me say that - and I do realize that most of the participants here have NO art background and at Notre Dame in Clayton's program - it is filled with those who have dedicated hours to composing something insightful on paper. Therefore I will do my best to teach and encourage the minds just being exposed to a deeper world of color, lines, texture, etc. I myself have years to go before I would consider myself a true artist.

One of Clayton's paragraphs:
"Nature gives a distinct look to each of her creations because nature loathes confusion. And so does good architecture. A capital is different than a base for the same reason head is different than a foot." God is a god of order and in good design there is a resolution of the parts to the whole. Things are not arbitrary-they have purpose. Think of a musical composition and how a musical score would sound if none of the notes made harmonic chords or if there was no logical rhythm. It would be torture to the ears. It is wise to think of our compositions in terms of the same principles-harmony, rhythm, emphasis, unity, etc. It is also good to think in both macro and micro scales. The entire civic composition (city scale) has been entirely lost and homes, yards, buildings, parks, ets. do not relate to one another in our modern world. Even though our zoning codes restrict us so heavily in terms of civic design, it's worth mentioning so that we can begin to think about our entire civic harmony and resolution and not the current hodge-podge of parking lots and distribution warehouses we call stores. Streets need regularity-landscape can provide a lot of that. I could go on, but that is all for this email.
I'll be in town till the 14th.