Abstractions of Winged Seeds in Motion
Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Gifts
The wooden blocks of the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Gifts provided Mr. Wright with endless combinations of patterns and designs as he moved them around by hand as a youngster on a kindergarden table and later in his mind on his drawing board. By representing objects from nature by arranging wooden cubes, rectangles and triangles on grids, abstraction became essential to his learning. Using simplified drawings of winged seeds of pinecones, Mr. Wright created a distinctly beautiful work of art for the SAMARA motif, which he adapted for perforated boards, TV table stands, the SAMARA rug and table runner, stationery, linens, copper fascia, garden lanterns and dining chairs.
In the Seventh Gift, Wright mastered the art of peeling surfaces or planes away from their volumes such as the cube and rearranging the flat surfaces to create new volumes to define a new sense of space. In this way, Frank Lloyd Wright broke up the box by imagining and then physically placing different flat surfaces and planes of various sizes and shapes together in ways that made space seem to flow along lines from one point to the next.
In his abstractions of winged seeds, Mr. Wright played with flat parquet tiles of the Seventh Gift. He started with one small equilateral triangle and combined it with an identical triangle to form a diamond-shaped figure, followed by adding other triangles to form progressively larger trapezoids culminating in even larger figures made up of combinations of equilateral triangles.