Land and Line

Doug Himes is an artist whose work strikes me as both ethereal and earthy with the ability to speak in both lithe lines and grounding colors. In other words, his art exhibits a specific Mormon attitude, drawing the line between the realities of a heaven that comes to earth and vice versa. His works invite our eyes to dig in as they plant our minds in the fertile soil of beauty. A gift and a grace, and ultimately a garden. 

Gardens link land with lines—row upon row, they criss and cross the earth in order to cultivate something new and living. Himes’s lines perform the same feat: marks across paper generate fresh, fecund forms, inviting us to pause and really look at our surroundings and see them with new eyes. This generative and generous spirit drew me to Himes’s work for this issue of the journal, with its focus on the ecologies that nourish our lives, our world, and our faith.

I asked Jay Griffith, whose trail running and writing place him in a similar thematic space, to respond to the garden (celebrated in the quintessential Mormon hymn “Adam-ondi-Ahman”) for this issue. The result—a poetic meditation on the garden we call earth—calls into question our own relationship with land and line. Are we gardeners? Are we Gods’? Are we cultivated? These questions are well worth considering—are we the land or are we the line?—both in art and life.