If you give someone a large, blank canvas, odds are they’ll put something in it. A field of snow becomes an impromptu way to taunt a rival. A Japanese rice paddy becomes a canvas for giant plant art. Every year, Japanese farmers in the Aomori prefecture town of Inakadate turn their fields into works of art using different colors and types of rice plants to create massive, beautiful murals.
To engage in this sort of thing is the perfect synthesis of art, farming, and planning. Someone must lay out this design, first and foremost. Then someone else has to plot out where each color of plant must go in the field. And, of course, someone has to actually make the plants grow, all because someone wanted to draw pictures in otherwise boring green fields.
This must be the same biological urge that causes people to create crop circles, or at least create giant ads out of crop circles. I can’t say I understand it, but I can say that it looks incredible!
Tags: unusual art, rice paddies, plant art, Japan, images, Inakadate, Aomori
