Greenwood Gardens

Greenwood Gardens, Milburn, NJ, base art, copr William Cook, 2013

The very first thing co-director Matt Gundy  and I discussed long before anything 

visual was developed was the ultimate purpose to be accomplished in this piece.  

The answer was legibility.  We established that a viewer of this piece would need 

to be able to wander around the grounds by eye and know exactly where everything 

was.  The word is wayfinding.  This necessitates very judicious sizing of anything 

that would obscure the pathways etc., in this case trees.  The tall trees are all there 

(for the most part) but are pictured a third of their actual height, almost as they might 

have been at a younger age--perfectly acceptable given the objective.  It's not 

noticeable to where it disturbs the piece.

Another concern was showing the topography, since the primary areas are terraces 

going down the side of a hill.  This needs to be clear not only for aesthetics, but for 

those who get down to the bottom of all this, being able to get back up.  There is a 

lot of height to deal with here, so anyone with walking constraints might want to know 

this. The topography actually shows up here.  I started with a contour map in 

perspective and actually cut out the terraces and arranged each a little higher than 

the next.  I am particularly pleased at how well this worked.

The size of the original is an important consideration.  The image is 16" across.  I 

selected that size to limit the detail so that I could accomplish the objective in a timely 

manner, and so that the piece could be reduced to a usable size and still look good.  

When one reduces a pen and ink piece, the width of the pen lines are also reduced.  

You can only go down so far before things fall apart.

This is the final art in its base state.  It is designed to work with colored pencil in its 

final state, hence the duotone pen and ink work--brown and black.   I tried coloring 

black ink drawings but found the technique awkward and boring in appearance.  

The addition of brown ink in an intermediate sense seemed more natural
and workable.  It took five days to get to this point, working with the reference
photos for each little passage drawn.  It will take another four days to color this
 piece, and several hours in the computer to complete.

Here is the final.  Greenwood just had it's grand opening last week after ten years of
restoration.  Truly a wonderful, magical place to visit.  Stop by for a stroll
[and some oxygen] if you're in the New York area.  

Greenwood Gardens, Milburn, NJ, copr William Cook, 2013

\\///\