7 Making lifelike animals and plants in the fabric of the building

When you begin to have a feeling for the unfolding process thoroughly, I think you may find — as I have done — that even the drawing of a single animal is an example of unfolding. The fundamental process has something to teach you, or to give you, even in the drawing of the space between a dog’s legs, or the shape of the leaves of a lily, or in the shape of a human eye in a carved head, or in a human breast, or in a fold of cloth since each of these — the breast, cloth, eye, leg, leaf — are centers, and will be shaped most profoundly when you make them centers in their own right, and when you make the space between them centers, too.

Meshwork — more so than in a network, things are more tightly connected in more or less regular intervals.

The essence of the idea is this. If we want to make a lifelike animal, the usual idea is to draw it as accurately as possible, to try and copy from nature as exactly as you can.
But the strange thing is that making a life-like bird, in a drawing, has nothing to do with copying exactly. To make a lifelike animal, in a drawing or an ornament, we have to make the animal out of centers. If the centers are good centers, then the animal starts to get life. The greater life in the animal comes from the field of centers which is created there, not from copying of “realism”.
This has a strange and paradoxical result. If when drawing a bird, I concentrate on the centers only, not so much on the bird, I may get a bird which is highly stylized, even abstract. Yet it is just this kind of stylized or abstract bird which can sometimes have the penetrating life we admire in works of art.

Copying a real bird is invaluable, if it inspires an understanding of the deep centers from which its life is made. In that sense ,being near a real animal is always inspiring. But then building a living structure out of centers is an entirely different process from simply trying to draw a realistic or naturalistic bird.

The real bird, the bird that flies in the sky, gets its life from the centers it is made of. The clay bird, made in tile, gets its life from its centers, too — not when it imitates the real bird, but when, like the real bird, it is a profound and intense field of centers in its own right.

In the history of art and architecture, the great periods almost always have something which we may call stylization in their animals and figures — not naturalistic ones. The super-realistic animals and people we are used to as “normal” come mainly from the nineteenth century when a wrong-headed sophistication made people begin thinking that super-realistic drawings were somehow more true to life.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/18 Ornament as part of all unfolding#