[design] The Talking Leaves Of The Midland Library

3017.

There is a big painting on the right as you enter the Midland Regional Branch of the mighty MultCoLib. It looks like this (as taken from the complete other end of the building because art, don't argue with me) …

The title is Talking Leaves. It's a biggie as one can see, stretching from about head-level to almost the ceiling. Below it, behind a clear panel, is what looks very much like conceptual sketches, in charcoal, of the creative process leading up to the panel.

The whole thing is abstracted trees and leaves, and the stories they tell about themselves. The beguiling gray and white and gradated thing on the right is noted as a 'lollipop tree', a fanciful thing. The suggestion of the lazy-8 inside always causes me to kind of space into it. Above is a leaf and another abstraction of that takes up the left. In the lower left corner, a seed.

There is another meaning of talking leaves, and I hope some of you who may be reading this arrived there before I tell you this: it's what Sequoyah called books.

It's only logical, therefore, that the motif be drawn out from the painting to cover the whole building. As it is, if you look along the high ceiling …

Th leaves alternate all the way down the center aisle, anchored by the seeds at the four corners of the design.