Crop-Art: designer paddies
Can art be made beyond places exclusively dedicated to creativity and design?
Well, it seems that now anything can be made into a wonderful work of art even rice paddies. Specifically, those in Inakadate, Japan, which have become a celebration of Japanese art with pictographs inspired by images from Hokusai and manga.
Since 1993, the farmers of this rural town have been cultivating the kodaima variety of rice with its dark leaves amongst their local variety, tsugaru-roman, which has light green leaves. The end results are rice fields unfolding in masterful chiaroscuro, which can be admired until they are, unfortunately, razed to the ground during harvesting.
Sometimes art is seasonal, just like fashion, and susceptible to obsolescence every six months. Crop-Art has an expiration date.
In Inakadate, that date is in September. So, if you can’t make it over there in time, take a look here.
Crop-Art can also be found on other continents. In the United States, people use colourful vegetable seeds rather than rice leaves. In Minnesota, there’s even a Crop Art fair, where, for twenty years, the undisputed master was a 98-year-old former hairdresser named Lillian Colton.
She was an exceptional artist who portrayed great American icons such as Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley, as well as a lovely loon that might just have been an American cousin of Mandarina.
Technorati Tags: Crop Art, Inakadate, Minnesota, Lillian Colton
