Kate’s Tent. Finke Two Mile: The Artist’s Garden: Humanising the Landscape

This selection of paintings was produced between 2010 - 2015 and celebrates the artist’s garden tradition and explores not just my love gardens and landscape but many of the formal aspects and distinctive features of garden culture. I have painted and researched many different types of gardens including Tudor gardens, knot gardens, parterre gardens, picturesque parkscapes – as well as the evolution of the various forms of the pictorial representations of the extended garden tradition. And whilst I have painted many different gardens in extremely different places my main focus throughout this time has been an exploration of the relationship I have with my own garden and the physical and metaphysical parallels that exist between gardening and painting. There is something wonderful about getting to know a place through painting it. It is quite a different experience than simply visiting or traveling through somewhere. My understanding is that you get to know certain features in a much more concentrated way. You experience those features that you choose to focus on rather than an overall and often superficial sense of what you see. The other great aspect of painting as you move through life is that you have a physical record of those experiences.

This painting was part of a field study on the Larapinta Trail in the Northern Territory in 2012