“Flowers or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments,” wrote Jones, advocating instead for “conventional representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the intended image to the mind without destroying the unity of the object they are employed to decorate.” In short, abstraction is the key. When nature is rendered mathematical, something chaotic and organic is turned into something regular, comprehensible, repeatable, and ultimately beautiful. Given the proliferation of the quatrefoil, he may have been onto something.
