Geometric

To most gardeners, topiary is the art of shaping plants into figures of animals or geometric forms by trimming and pruning them, or by making wire frames and planting them. During the Renaissance, the art of trimming and pruning flourished in the gardens of France and Italy, and today we're all familiar with the wire-frame topiary creations at Disneyland and Disney World. But you needn't own a villa or a theme park to have a green menagerie. And you don't even have to have a back yard.

Are we crazy, or what? On a recent Saturday, we were among eight women--friends and colleagues--who raised iced tea glasses to toast a rather buxom, middle-aged Swedish woman whom only one of us had met. Each of us wore one of her designs. The luncheon table was set with place mats and napkins in two of "her" colors, sea green and bright pink, and the cake's icing mimicked a Gudrun pattern. Even the dog was festooned with a scarf from an old Gudrun outfit.

This summer's newest hairstyles come straight from the history books--1960s history, that is. Back-combed "bubbles," wash-and-wear geometrics, and hippie-like, long, straight styles are being reshaped. At Cristophe and Vidal Sassoon, two top Beverly Hills salons, recent shows featured versions of looks first seen on the pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar more than 20 years ago.

Kenneth Price, a prolific Los Angeles artist whose work with glazed and painted clay transformed traditional ceramics while also expanding orthodox definitions of American and European sculpture, died early Friday at his home and studio in Taos, N.M. He was 77. Price had struggled with tongue and throat cancer for several years, his food intake restricted to liquids supplied through a feeding tube. Despite his infirmity, he continued to produce challenging new work and to mount critically acclaimed exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles, New York and Europe.

Channa Horwitz, an artist known for her dizzyingly intricate geometric drawings and paintings based on complex predetermined systems, died Monday of complications from Crohn's disease at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica. She was 80. In 1968, while still a student, Horwitz proposed a project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's seminal exhibition "Art and Technology" that would have involved collaborating with engineers to suspend eight large, free-floating Plexiglas beams within the space of a magnetic field, accompanied by eight beams of light that would fluctuate in intensity depending on the position of the beams.

In Los Angeles, the good things often slip away in the night. One morning you head for your favorite breakfast spot only to discover it's been turned into a used-clothing store. No one seems to know why. It's just got switched. When I first came to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, I remember walking past the old Sunkist building in downtown and thinking how perfect it seemed.

It's been a big week for non-figurative art. On Thursday, it was reported that French archaeologists discovered a wall painting in Syria whose tricolored, geometric pattern resembles the work of abstract painter Paul Klee. The catch: At 11,000 years old, it's the oldest painting in the world. So much for the theory that the Impressionists changed everything.

When plunging in for the kill, a peregrine falcon swoops toward its prey at close to 200 mph. But the real miracle of this dive is the path the bird takes through the air: With almost computer-like precision, the falcon follows a mathematical curve known as a logarithmic spiral. The shortest path, of course, would be a straight line, but since a falcon's eyes are opposed on either side of its head, straight flight would require the bird to cock its head to keep the prey in sight.

The new Claremont Museum of Art made just the right choice for its inaugural exhibition. Tightly organized and lovely to look at, the 42-year survey of 42 paintings (and one drawing) by Karl Benjamin honors the leading artist of the museum's home city. Benjamin arrived in Claremont in 1952, a young public school teacher who had recently begun to paint, and in 1994 he retired from Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University as the schools' most distinguished art professor.