Japanese Garden

 The Japanese lantern creates a focal point in this sketch of the Seattle Japanese Garden.  This is one half of a two page sketch I created in my Arches journal.  I discovered in painting garden scenes that masses of shrubs, trees and flowering plants can overwhelm the eye, presenting a chaotic image with no organization and no hierarchy of form.  Not always a bad thing!  But if the eye is to rest, it can be helpful to anchor the competing  trees and shrubs to a structure or hardscape of some kind.  This is well-understood by landscape designers.