8 Simplicity of ornamental human figures

Really, even as a carving, the thing can be viewed quite abstractly, as a system of centers, and nothing else — not as a lifelike thing at all. And then the feeling which it has, and its feeling of life, comes from the fact that there is a beautiful system of centers there, not from the fact that it “resembles” a human figure.

Just as the carving is, the coloring, too, is completely abstract — intended only to create the field of centers as sharply as possible, in a way which melts.

More surprising, I think you will find — as the primitives did — that it is natural, even necessary, for animals, plants, flowers, to appear in buildings. I believe that this itself occurs — not from a primitive symbolic idea about ornament, nor because of animistic superstition, not even just from the love of animals and plants. Rather, I think you will find, the more deeply you have experienced this process, that the impulse to make animals, people, faces, flowers, trees — on the surface of the building walls, carved into the columns, scratched on the surfaces, molded into the materials — follows naturally, and inevitably, from the process of making.
It is a natural outgrowth of the fundamental process with its emphasis on centers — the true unfolding process — and it will play a profound role, ultimately, helping to reconcile you to the land and to our origins.

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