Walking through Art

     Art makes us see things differently. We see a pond with water lilies through Monet's eyes. An empty bar reminds us of Edward Hopper. A swirl of stars in the sky takes on the expression of Van Gogh. But my experience at the Atlanta Botanical Garden last week was the opposite art experience. Walking through the tulip gardens around the Chihuly sculpture was like walking in a painting.

      The artist of this living painting was as accomplished and talented as any Monet or Picasso because what is art, after all, but an arrangement of color and design? The medium of this unnamed artist working with his unsigned and ephemeral piece of art was not paint but flowers – tulips, to be precise, and his palette was monochromatic orange, one color of tulip stunningly contrasting to and enhancing the blue Chihuly glass sculpture squiggling upward like the splash of a fountain in the center of the tulips. White tulips among the orange ones were like the white sheen on the glass where the sun stroked it. And occasionally among the palette of orange was a dark maroon tulip, an accent, like the dashes of blue and purple on a Van Gogh self-portrait or a chiaroscuro hint in the brown shades of a Rembrandt. Walking through the tulip-and-Chihuly garden was as stunning an art experience as I've ever had.

With this photo you can only look at the art 

experience, but it gives an idea of what it 

would be like to walk in it.

      At another place in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, I came around the bend in the path at the top of a hill and looked through the woods at a tall yellow glass sculpture that at first glance I thought was a tree, reflected in the long narrow pool of water at its base. It was another Chihuly glass sculpture, beautifully situated to emphasize the height and narrowness of the sculpture and the length and narrowness of the pond. When I walked close to it, I saw that the sculpture was made of hollow glass tubes filled with neon gas. At night, the yellow neon twists would be reflected in the pond, surely a breathtaking sight.

     Other parts of the garden displayed living sculptures beyond imagination – beyond my imagination, anyway, but some artist who knows how to sculpt with flowers did imagine it, creating enormous statues of dirt in which to insert annual flowers that would make the statues seem entirely sculpted with flowers. The Earth Goddess was the face and arm of a woman, enormous in execution, rising above a pond with water falling in various levels in front of her. Her expression is calm and serene. Her hair flows with abundance all about her face and shoulders. She is holding up a hand, from which flows a stream of water. I wanted to sit in the palm of that hand, letting the water flow over my back and legs, basking in the peace of the Earth Goddess. It was a beautiful sculpture even in its winter form. I can only imagine what it must look like when she is in full bloom.

      As we walked through the garden we saw similar statues: three life-size camels saddled with what would be a burden of flowers; a dragon, probably life-size; others that I can't remember. They were magnificent even in their blandly dirt-colored form. When they are planted next month, with up to 10,000 labor hours, they will suddenly burst into color and movement. I want to go back and see the garden then.

      But, of course, if I go to the Atlanta Botanical Garden in April, I would miss the orange tulips around the blue Chihuly. The Chihuly would still be there, but, like the Earth Goddess in her winter dress, it would not be in its full glory, just a piece of art slumbering after a joyous flowering. This year, I was witness to that particular joyous and extraordinary flowering of art, the painting with flowers in which I could walk. There's no wonder Architectural Digest cited Atlanta's as one of the eight most beautifully designed botanical gardens in the country.