Dutch West India Company c. 1936

Helen Miller made this drawing of the Dutch West India Company's experimental garden at some point in the 20th century using watercolor on paper. Look at these muted, earthy greens and browns. They almost give the sense of a faded memory. You can see the garden’s rigid structure, its ordered plots and ornamental arrangements laid out in neat geometric shapes. It's like a plan, or an idea of a garden, rather than a real place, but it is also strangely evocative, almost as if the map itself is a kind of artwork. The drawing feels both precise and dreamlike. I can imagine Miller, in her studio, carefully rendering each section, maybe thinking about the layers of history embedded in this landscape and trying to capture the essence of something that is at once artificial and organic. It reminds me that all artists are in a constant process of reinterpretation and transformation. We're all just borrowing and building on each other’s visions, trying to capture the world as we see it, one gesture at a time.