A Painted Garden

‘Summer Cumquats’ depicts a housewarming gift - a cumquat tree I planted early this year in my new garden. Executed over several weeks - whenever the smoke haze from nearby bushfires lifted enough to go outside - I had in mind to call it ‘The Painted Garden’. I later learned of a fresco of the same name painted in the first century BC for the Villa of Livia, parts of which bear an uncanny resemblance to my small cumquat painting. The garden is common ground, connecting us to ancient gardeners, and also, apparently, ancient garden painters. Thematically speaking, gardens are about as timeless a concept as I can think of. Along with artists of every era, we find ancient scribes and modern poets equally likely to wander their paths. In the words of T. S. Eliot: “Other echoes inhabit the garden..”

In late 2019 I decided to produce ‘garden paintings’ for my show at A.K. Bellinger, and of course I could not have foreseen then that many would be retreating with me, each to their respective gardens. The restrictions placed on us by this year’s pandemic hindered my plans to paint in the gardens of friends and neighbours, but encouraged me to get to know my new garden, to tend it, and to be revived in it. Foraging in forests beyond the garden gate provided some more exotic subjects but I made just as many pleasing discoveries going down the back steps.  I hope this collection conveys some of the fruitfulness of the season it was painted in, but also that different, somehow restorative sense of time with which a garden walk can imbue the soul.