Falling leaf diagrams,
by Mr. Fritz Horstman.

Late last year, Fritz Horstman posted a new project of his: Falling Leaf Diagrams. The concept is simple, the execution is elegant, and the results are beautiful.

The concept: Take a video of leaves falling. For each frame, trace the location of the leaf onto paper. Thereby accumulate a static record of the leaf’s motion through space, on paper.

The execution: Two drawings, one in color, one monochrome. The monochrome drawing – thin black lines on white paper – appears to trace the patterns of five leaves, each beginning its fall from a separate point in space. The polychrome drawing – thicker lines, each its own color – traces eighteen leaf paths, each beginning from the same point and diverging almost immediately.

The results: Intricate twisting diagrams, revealing shifting leaf aspects, the depth of the landscape, the complexity of motion of a simple object. Insight into a seasonal pattern, an evolved survival mechanism, a mundane event.

These drawings look like choreographic plans, seen from above, somewhat abstractly marking out the movements of a company of dancers. Starting from one end of the stage, they shimmy most of the way across, passing each other lightly. The speed of their motion is implied by the spacing of the lines, and certain moments of line–crossing chaos hint at complexities of motion hidden by the transfer of their movements to paper.

Like a plan, but Fritz’s word “map” is more accurate, since this is a diagram of what actually is, not what is intended. There is no choreography. The dance exists only so long as the leaves are falling; as soon as they reach the ground the dance is over and the dancers are gone.

This is a map of what actually was. By focusing on two elements only – the aspect of each leaf and its position in space and time – and abstracting away all others, Fritz has revealed much about the scene that would not otherwise have been visible.

There is no air here, on these pieces of paper, but you can see it implicitly, even almost feel it in places, as you trace your eyes down the leaf paths, observing how the turning of each successive line happens in consort with the arcing and curving of the entire path. There is no ground, yet each leaf line ends at a different place within the unstated perspective. There is no time, no minutes and seconds, though the paper itself has been transformed into time’s axis, a flattening of all four dimensions into two, with no loss of information. There is no time in the larger sense either, no months and years, no seasons, no weather, no climate, no life, no growth, no transformation.

And there is, in fact, no leaf – but your mind comes alive with curled, browned, dried out leaves, dropped mid–fall, the changing lengths of day, the changing temperatures, the fading chlorophyll, and the resulting hormonal changes within the tree itself all working towards the moment of abscission, when the cells of the stem part and the leaf falls, to twist and turn through the air, spinning down towards the ground.