Jack Stewart
North Vancouver, Canada
Color, Place, and animism in 'Flowery Tuscany'
The landscape of "Flowery Tuscany" (1927) reflects an ecological balance between man and nature. Lawrence identifies over twenty flowering species as individual life-forms. He distinguishes pure intense blue, in the grape-hyacinths, from tonal variations and shows a painter's sense of interacting colors, related to shapes or markings or abstracted in the intense scarlet redness of anemones or the incandescent greenness of leaves. In his phenomenological vision, velvety texture combines with brilliant hue to form an "apparition." As color is a function of light, so resonance is of texture. Color stimulates Lawrence's acts of attention. He looks at flowers as a painter-botanist and his observations of colored light distinguish luminosity, radiance, translucence, opacity, and saturation. His penetrating study of green matches his study of red. The eye moves from one tone to another ("glossy green," "apple-green," "emerald"), before dissolving distinctions in a visionary aura. The adjective "green" becomes the plural substantive "greens," signifying endless variations, and finally the abstraction "greenness." The sensations Lawrence describes ultimately point to an ontological "isness" that can only be experienced.
Lawrence's floral imagery combines motion and sound with color, form, and texture in multi-sensory synaesthesia. The impact of massed bright colors in the crocuses gives an animistic impression of movement; Lawrence celebrates the principle of growth in their upthrusting energy. Touch and motion supplement sight and a sixth sense makes the invisible visible. Lawrence's holistic vision links flora and fauna: violets are "like tiny dark hounds" and "the translucent membranes of blood-veined leaves" are "like the thin wings of bats." X-ray vision supports animism: "the aspens have the . . . glow of living membrane." Man is part of this lexicon. Lawrence connects floral, animal, and human forms, emphasizing their uniqueness and "vital relatedness."