Slawson Creations

My Personal Journey
 

David Slawson's journey:

   Looking back, it doesn’t seem such a stretch that a kid who grew up playing in the woods at the edge of a fast-growing suburb in the 1950's wound up designing landscape gardens. I can still remember experiencing those magical places of my childhood.

   I first fell in love with Japan during my last year in the Marines, a four-year detour from college and part of my search for who I was and what kind of world I lived in. While in Japan, I traveled around the country and saw gardens in Hakone, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and other places. But it wasn't until I made my first garden, totally untutored, at my parents' home, that it dawned on me--here was a way of capturing those magical places of childhood. After completing my undergraduate degree in philosophy at Kent State in Ohio, I did my Master's in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii. I made Japanese gardens my focus, in effect creating my own discipline.

What I found in the landscape gardens of Japan and other such nature-based East Asian arts as landscape painting, were wonderful, ethereal places far beyond what I had experienced as a child. In recent years I have had the good fortune of finding a wealth of “Oriental landscapes” closer to home, in the wild preserves of our National Parks, in places like Sedona, Yosemite, Zion, Mt. Rainier, the Black Hills, the Smokies, Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, the White Mountains, and Acadia.

Serving a two-year apprenticeship in Kyoto under the noted garden master Kinsaku Nakane gave me the tools to design, build, and maintain landscape gardens inspired by nature. I cannot imagine any more effective way to internalize the facility of using rocks and plants than this form of “body learning.” As long as I am alive, I will continue growing in my grasp of this 1400-year-old landscape art form for evoking the beauty of nature. For me, there is no more magical, wonder-inspiring job than creating three-dimensional landscape paintings for human enjoyment, whether in a residential client’s backyard, outside the windows of a restaurant or art museum, or in a botanical garden.

david@slawsoncreations.com

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Last modified: 06/12/07