"Oak Savanna Orihon"
Ink in Orihon Folding Sketchbook, Signed
June 2019
4" x 6" (folded)
40" x 6" (unfolded)

Artist Statement

I began working in orihon, accordion-fold sketchbooks, in 1994 and have continued working in this medium since then. The sketchbooks are purchased in Beijing on Liulichang Street, in Tokyo at Itoya, or at a private paper-making workshop in Kyoto. I have been drawing recently in Sennelier Urban Sketchbooks, and this sketchbook is one of those I purchased in Barcelona. The leaf portraits in the sketchbook are black oak (Quercus velutina) leaves collected at Miller Woods during my Summer 2019 National Park Service Artist-in-Residence at Indiana Dunes National Park. Miller Woods is one of the most intact oak savannas remaining in the United States. My investigations of leaf portraits follow my previous botanical investigations of sakura, cherry trees (during my 2012 National Endowment for the Arts/ US-Japan Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellowship). I find the orihon format to be highly portable, imposing fewer constraints than individual codex book pages. The format approaches the linear extension of scrolls, which allows for longer and more continuous drawing of landscape subjects.

About the Artist

Ron Henderson, FASLA, is founding principal of L+A Landscape Architecture and a professor of landscape architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), where he is also director of the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism Program. He is a Senior Fellow of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, a Japan-US Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellow, and Artist-in-Residence at the National Park Service. He is author of The Gardens of Suzhou, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and is currently co-Primary Investigator for the Driverless City Project, which is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. His recent award-winning projects include the Elizabethan Theater at Chateau d'Hardelot in France, the Gardens of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, City Walk and the Landfill Garden, both in Providence, Rhode Island, Anthracite Garden in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Memorial to the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Nantes, France, and the China Pavilion Jiuzhou Qingyan Roof Garden at the 2010 World Exposition in Shanghai, China.