Communal activities

And what are the activities? "What you do here is cook," Dawson says. "Eating is the social activity and it's all outdoors." Food preparation, dining and clean-up become communal activities. He describes the serenity of long, leisurely evenings on the trellised patio in candle glow: "We lie out at night, talking outside, and that is something I don't get in the city. We eat and then we go for a walk and then we eat more and look at a plant that is blooming that day."

Dawson is quick to deflate the notion that food is better in the country than in the city: "It's hard to get things out here. You can't find a bottle of balsamic vinegar for 50 miles."

Chicago gallery dealer Roger Ramsay always arrives with a stack of books, several bags of groceries and a case of fine wine.

The other enticing activity is roaming through the gardens bordering the house and following paths into less-cultivated areas.

Dawson has transferred his gallery sensibility to the larger scale of the landscape. "I think of juxtaposing in the landscape the same way I do in the gallery." He transmits his excitement, his "constant sense of revelation," through strategic placement of objects throughout the grounds, offering visitors the chance to encounter unanticipated aspects of the natural environment. He placed millstones created in the Ming Dynasty as paving leading through the moss garden, and a stone statue of Nandi the bull, vehicle of the Indian god Siva, just over the hill from a neighbor's herd of cows. He even purchased and refurbished a neglected log cabin. It is now the guesthouse, as well as the largest piece of folk art on the property.

Through Dawson's intermixing of fabricated objects and nature, both take on something of each other's qualities. Sculpture is revealed in the undulations and thickly incised bark of a 300-year-old red oak.

Conversely, the contours of several Indonesian Neolithic stones are so rounded with age and their incised carvings so effaced, that in nature they almost reassume their elemental state.

While he acknowledges a desire to "imprint myself on the landscape," Dawson favors the light touch, comparing it to the mark of the hand seen on petroglyphs.

"Being directed within the landscape heightens my experience of the land (more) than if I just wander. But I love that interface where neither the human touch nor the natural situation is dominant. I like it when the line is blurred."