Robert Kushner: Wild Gardens

The works in Wild Gardens reflect Kushner's longtime appreciation of Japanese art and culture combined with the use of composer and visual artist John Cage's "chance operation" system of composition. Several years ago, Kushner began incorporating elements of Cage's theories of chance composition as a major component in his own painting. Kushner and Cage met on an artists' retreat in the South Seas in 1980 and became friends, sharing interests in art, life, and flowers. Multiple layers of randomness echo throughout the paintings in this book--starting with the sheer accident of the physical survival of the individual antique screens and doors and their arrival in Kushner's New York studio and culminating in the compositions rows of similar leaves or flowers are repeated, with the selection of color or form indicated by chance operation, and with the use of counting and placement systems that yield strangely unexpected but surprisingly naturalistic results.