the ground plane and texture gradients
Dutch painters used chequered floors to map out a domestic world, a plane upon which people placed their posessions and moved about their daily lives. To me, there was something about regular, machine planted crops that suggested the surface of a field could be grasped in a similar way.
I think I was drawn to this idea as a way of plotting where I was in a difficult time. But whatever the personal reasons behind this idea, a secure relationship to the plane is fundamental for everyone. We walk on the plane: the plane affords us our animal freedom.
I first came across the ideas of enviromental affordance and texture gradients in the work of the brilliant experimental psycologist J J Gibson:
I took a series of photos across the field and made digital colour selections that
reveal a natural association between colours and texture gradients :
These colours represent the darker shade greens within the wheat. A printout helped to determine the distribution of darker greens taken from this on the spot oil study :
