The Undecidable Woods - Le Bois de Lauzelle

Le Bois de Lauzelle is located in Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium.
The trees may be beeches.
I will look through my pics to see if I can confirm.
Photo by M. Balk

When Little Bart was in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, she posted this picture of le Bois de Lauzelle on her blog. The photo of green trees and red forest floor immediately resonated with something that I had seen before. I pictured a horsewoman, gliding in and out of the trees, at least sort of, but in an odd way.

With a little bit of googling I found what I was looking for, Magritte's Le Blanc-Seing (The Blank Signature, 1965). René Magritte was Belgian and maybe these are the kinds of woods he used for his painting. I have seen so many photos of his painting with various tints, that I do now know whether Magritte's trees are glowing green, too. Here is one from renemagritte.org that looks similar to the one I have linked to here. These trees are greenish, but compared to real life, maybe a bit subtle. What museum has the painting? Maybe the National Gallery of Art? From that link you can see what is the exhibition history of Le Blanc-Seing. Interesting!

The trees have the same green lichen-y or algae-y glow.
And the horsewoman is experiencing the poiuyt effect, as I will call it.
Or the "confuse-a-human" effect.
Mad Magazine is where I first learned of this,
what my family of origin called a three-pronged sprong.
Another famous picture is Hayward's Undecidable Monument.
Was Hogarth's 1754 Satire on False Perspective one of the earliest
non-accidental False perspective pictures?
Who wouldn't want to create bad perspectives
after looking at Hogarth's picture?

Another view of the woods.

The colors of this one are so orderly - green, red, yellow.

The horses were riding away from us!

Then when we visited in May, more pictures, but the trees were in full leaf. The woods' color were green all over, no longer having the wonderful qualities of the red fallen leaves and the green trunks. HOWEVER, we did find horsewomen riding through the woods.

At last, horses riding the correct direction!

:

And we did find this sign with a picture of a rider.

Now some photos of the woods!

The signage for Le Bois de Lauzelle.

If I had designed this fountain,
I would hope that Magritte would come upon it in the forest.

You can see the green on the trunk of this tree with the interesting roots.

The signs were very nicely done.
Cut a tree,
carve the name,
install.

Green green green!

In the forest were gigantic copper beeches,
so large and obviously at home.
This one was but a pup.

My somewhat lame attempt to do some "false perspective".

Original, in case that was too subtle!

Here's a fun interactive online Magritte exhibit.