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.

In The Garden of Ideas, Richard Aitken expresses the notion that “gardens have a profound significance to humankind. They have universal values as repositories of cultivated plants, maintained using the skills of horticulture and order through diverse processes bound by tradition and innovation”. Those words – diverse processes bound by tradition and innovation – directly mirror what I understand the act of painting to be, which could also be characterised as an exploration of the tension that always exists within painting between tradition and innovation. This tension (which also exists in garden practice), whether that is the physical endeavour or the material quality, is often resolved by challenging the various processes involved in producing a painting, trying something different or taking account of the historical precedence. The good thing is that knowledge is shared and passed on and our understanding of tradition and culture is enhanced.

When viewing these paintings I believe it may be helpful to have an understanding of some of the practical considerations of my approach to painting. As an artist, I have gone out into the landscape (garden) and painted en plein air my version of what was there. By painting flowering bushes, trees and the various forms of a garden directly from life I have sort to gain a deeper knowledge and understanding of my subject. I have done this by looking, by considering what is seen, and by painting my response, to that experience. It has always been my intention, not to make a painting of a particular place but to try to make a painting of an experience of that place. Everyday, sometimes several times a day I will walk through my garden in Springwood, checking the health of plants, growth patterns or to plan what needs to be done, and time frame in which I feel I can do what’s needed. This act of constant looking, thinking about what needs to be cut back or reshaped, watered or cared for flows directly into how I see images and the way I paint. It is built into the way I live and the way I see the world. As a general introduction to these paintings it may also be helpful to know that there has been several key artists that I studied in depth throughout this period; three of those artists are, the English artist Stanley Spencer, the colonial artist John Glover and the German Romantic painter Casper David Friedrich. The compositional complexities, the heightened atmospherics and the metaphoric potential on offer in the paintings of these artists is what draws me to them. What is also important is that it is these characteristics (like painting) also exist and are paralleled in gardens a gardening.

By focusing on my garden subject for an extended period of time I have set out to define at least some of the universal qualities of a garden and how they relate to painting and to other parts of my life. This study has been helped by considering the historic development of garden culture and by looking at gardens through eyes of other artists. But most what I hoped to achieve was to come to a better understanding of my connection with gardens and the natural world and to find real meaning in what I see and feel, through painting.