Taliesin West – In the Sculpture Garden 2
Digital painting 2007
This has been sitting on my computer for a year waiting for me to finish it up. Another Taliesin Sculpture Garden painting is here.
I just liked the shadows on the pavement as being a part of the sculpture garden at that moment. And the man in the fish shirt with the Taliesin West water bottle jammed in his back pocket. There we were in the hot autumn (just beginning) desert and he in this shirt with the fish swimming in the blue. Like a desert pond.
“A desert pond?”
Never mind. My eye hit the light on that blue shirt and its fish and stuck there. Wow, it’s a…desert pond!
Photos don’t really represent Taliesin West as it feels. The buildings look like they’d behave like regular buildings in a sense of weight. But Taliesin West, despite the stone and concrete employed, gives the impression of an origami structure, lightweight, even fragile, which isn’t much to do with the canvas roofing, but a general sensibility. In photos it’s impressive but in the flesh it’s peculiarly unassuming. Taliesin West doesn’t overwhelm in part or as a whole. The atmosphere of the textures and space is receptive and calm. The design seems content to give a welcoming first impression and then wait for you to notice, over a period of time, how it is a place of a thousand and one perspectives, each individually framed and on reserve for when you turn the corner and are open to seeing. Maybe that’s one reason H.o.p. liked it there as much as he did. Because he loved it. With the exception of the UFO Museum I think it remains at the top of favored places he’s visited.
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