Even more oddly, thirty years ago a few ecologists began adopting the concepts of the modernist art period to help them describe landscapes and seascapes and big-sized environments. Both disciplines love contemplating the contrasts between edges and patches. Parallels go much further. Landscape ecologists similarly ponder patches such as beaver ponds in a watershed or forest groves dotted among evenly textured farmlands. To conservation biologists, for instance, the size and shape of a patch of forest may mean the difference between protection of a rare warbler's home or nest parasitism by cowbirds.
Informed intuition serves both painters and naturalists well.
The boundaries of the canvas have always bothered painters. One solution was the heavy gold frame. But modern artists rebelled against this over-defining box. They encouraged museums and galleries to paint their walls white and to use baby-spot lighting. Then they played with the canvas's boundary by painting its edge as white as the wall.