The Garden Study series is, in the spirit of Alexander Von Humboldt’s pioneering work, an effort to credit the imagery, which has shaped the Western view of land and wilderness. However, whereas Humboldt sought to explore the last horizons of the globe in an effort to make an “inventory of the world,” [1] the Garden Studies series is an editorial inventory of the history of land depiction and its relationship to geography and land treatment. The Garden Study series is part of my ongoing investigation of, creation mythology, natural history, cosmogony the history of landscape painting and the relevance of land depiction in contemporary culture. The Garden Study drawing series relates to a larger series of assemblage sculptures entitled Terra Reverentia, and are meant as a kind of compliment series. The Garden Studies are drawn over the pages Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Each work has a miniature hand painted landscape—a marginalized view of land—referenced from either the history of landscape painting or imaginary or observed landscapes.

Todd Bartel, Montpelier, August 2004

[1] Jean Clair, Humboldt to Hubble, found in Cosmos: from Romanticism to Avant-garde, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Prestel Verlag, New York, NY, 1999, p. 21