Rivers and Tides

The first thing that caught my attention in the movie, Rivers and Tides, was how much work Andy Goldsworthy puts into his art. The start of the movie shows him putting icicles together to form a zigzagging shape that resembles a river. By the time he finishes this, which he has been working on for a long time, the sun rises and starts to melt it away. The beautiful design he made doesn’t even last for a day before it is destroyed. This is also true with many of the other things he created, such as; the rock egg which fell over a few times before he was done, the circular whirlpool object made of drift wood, and also the spider web looking object made of sticks and thorns. I myself would not have the patients to create such designs from nature, for them to only be destroyed within a few hours. I would also have a lot of anger built up inside me if my art kept falling over before I finished completing it, like what happened to him with the stone egg.

I think it is very interesting how he only made his art with his hands and natural objects from nature. He used sticks to put the leaves together to float down the river, and he just used manual labor to drag all the stones to where he made his egg shaped statue. Goldsworthy didn’t use any form of industrial supplies to create his masterpieces and he even found ways to add color, by using crushed rocks to create a red tint into the stream.