I am pleased to welcome this Dover edition of Abstraction in Art and Nature, knowing that it will serve a new generation of artists, teachers, and students. The objective of the book is simple: it is intended to provide artists with the means of navigating through the complexities of nature that are revealed to us by the naked eye and by the discoveries of science.
First, however, it is important for us to understand that artists study nature in ways that are different from scientists. Scientists measure and quantify nature in a detached and objective fashion. Artists, on the other hand, experience nature in a subjective fashion, giving themselves up to the forms, movements, and colors of the events of experience. And it is a very challenging task to find the sense of order in the seeming chaos of nature and artistic emotion. Finding the hidden order of nature is what this book is all about.
The secret of the method of approach used in this book, if it is a secret, is that it teaches the artist to follow the common threads of the formative process through the seven realms of nature: the energy forms, the atmospheric forms, the water forms, the earth forms, the plant forms, the animal forms, and finally the unifying form of the human being.
This book gives the artist, the art teacher, and the student a rational method of classifying and examining the forms and expressions of nature in a living way—without having to stick a pin through a butterfly or to pickle some other creature in formaldehyde. The method outlined in this book will allow you to take nature into your heart as the living, breathing part of yourself. You are the most important part of this book! This book will teach you how to draw from your own experience and to enlarge your own expressiveness because you are a part of nature.
NATHAN CABOT HALE, PH.D., NA
Amenia, New York, 1992