Landscape Scenography: Setting the Stage for Garden Mystery June 23, 2010

A well-designed garden captures the visitor's imagination and creates a variety of visual and spatial experiences. Elizabeth Boults' and Chip Sullivan's approach to illustrating the history of landscape design is unique in their use of 'visual narratives' and sequential drawings--comic strips, appropriately enough for a lecture in the Walt Disney Family Museum--to illuminate the narrative embedded in these great garden scenarios. The lively presentation will capture a behind-the-scenes look at how nature's actors performed in these spectacular gardens.

Elizabeth Boults is a landscape architect and educator living in Berkeley, California. She teaches at the University of California, Davis, and at UC Berkeley Extension in San Francisco. Elizabeth maintains a small art-based practice and teaches courses in landscape drawing, design, and history. She was awarded a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2009.

Chip Sullivan is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Drawing the Landscape, a popular treatise on drawing and the creative process, and of Garden and Climate, a beautifully illustrated book on energy-conserving landscape design. His work deals with the delicate balance between humans and nature, and his drawings, constructions, and installations have been exhibited widely. Chip was the 1985 Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome and is a recent MacDowell fellow.

General admission for event is $30; Garden Conservancy members: $25. Students: $15. A "two-lecture" discount is available for registrants to both Presidio Garden Lectures (general admission: $55; Garden Conservancy members: $45). Registration is available online at www.gardenconservancy.org or call 415-441-4300.