“I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always “
Claude Monet
The garden brings us back to the biological rhythms of life. Gardens can create a safe enclosure helping us to shift to a more reflective state of mind.
A symbiotic relationship exists between painting and gardening. For me, as a keen gardener and ex-florist, the colour harmonies, forms and textures found in a garden can be likened to brushstrokes. A balance and tension occur between the formal and the organic.
The idea of ‘Green at the heart’ is the common thread that ties my work together, by placing what the twelfth century Abbess Saint Hildegard of Bingen called Viriditas or ‘greenness’ at the heart of her thinking Hildegard recognised that people can only thrive when the natural world thrives.
All the gardens in my oil paintings have strong identities or an intriguing backstory of how they came into being, creating a sense of connection and continuity.
The oil paintings you see are informed by visits I have made to gardens both in this country and abroad, including Monet’s Garden just outside of Paris. Some are familiar and I return to them repeatedly with my sketchbooks and watercolours such as the immersive subtropical garden of Trebah based on pleasure gardens, whilst others have been new discoveries for me, such as the Italian garden at St Mawes.
The Japanese gardens at Newquay provide a mediative space. Whereas the Lost Gardens of Heligan and the Chelsea Physic Garden in London are cultivated with a distinct purpose in mind. To heal, to soothe, to replace something that has been lost or to spark the imagination.
The paintings in the collection are seasonal, beginning with ‘Where swallows fly’ last summer which depicts a wildflower meadow close to where I live in Cornwall. The meadow no longer exists due to building work. The painting references a duality of loss and the freedom and beauty of a late summer’s evening.
Working from photographs and sketches, once back in my studio I try to capture the essence of each garden. Blurring the lines between image and memory. A process akin to recalling a dream that stitches together disparate locations, and moments in time.
Above all though it is the colour in each garden at different phases of the year that interests me the most.
