THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Charles
O. Perry
www.charlesperry.com
This the Garden of Eden. All the other allegories not withstanding we have given a whole universe. I am obsessed with the wonderful mysteries of our universe. All my work in art has had some reference to what we were given. My very first water colour was a vain attempt to extol the beauties of the wilds of Montana, where I was born and where I camped with my father. Two years later, when fighting in Korea, I realised that creating things, actually making or inventing things, was always, and always would be, a necessary part of my daily life. I even invented a better telescope for my observation on the line.
Then on R and R in Kyoto, the beauty of the Japanese
Architecture moved me to act. Their reverent use of our natural materials was
perfection itself. This forced the issue :
I must return to school and study Art and Architecture.
When I arrived at Yale, it was at the
time of the Bauhaus, when we were encouraged to experiment with materials to
discover "their true nature" which really meant that we were to
invent new forms that exploited the
properties of these materials.
But let us go back to the Garden of
Eden. Today this once simple garden is now a vast array of everything,
everything from the sub atomic to the galactic is exploding all around us and
we call it the "information explosion". It is more like a peek into the
Pandora's box. Is this the discovery of the tip of the glacier of eternal
secrets ?
The news today of scientific
discoveries is epic in proportion to just twenty years ago. Just the Hubbell
telescope 's discoveries and the DNA race give us this peek at our gifts, not
to mention the amazing quantum physics which blows everything away a capricious
photon.
I try to grapple with these wonderful happenings all
around us and somehow make thing that remind us, as in music, of these
phenomena. For some reason I insist on inventing or at least being rigidly
specific in each piece of sculpture. If I were a painter it would become an
other game, but I have no to make things with the laws that nature has laid
out.
In applying these laws to building
things, I soon came across the book "Growth and Form" by D'Arcy
Thompson. This was a wonderful book on morphology with enough illustrations to
spur my interest and at the same time convince me of the worth of my quest. My
ignorance was definitely a big help, because it added to the mystery of what I
was trying to do.
Actually that same ignorance has driven me always toward the end of that rainbow. The very misunderstanding of the way tetrahedrons fit together eventually taught me solid geometry. (At least in my version of solid geometry). After all I am not a mathematician. I am an artist and the next piece of news in science is always another piece of my puzzle.
What joy it brings to realise how infinitely small we are and how little we know.