Letters to garden makers

Dear Monty, It is an odd thing that it takes so long to accept that failure is a good thing when making something, it is part of the gift of learning. Today I have been litter picking with  mcsuk.org at Langland Bay, and taking poor photographs, but what a beautiful way to learn. Life can be beautiful, even when removing plastic from our shoreline. I am still trying to look at the world with an artists eye. I have started a portrait in watercolour without any under drawing. Painting without trying to make the portrait as a likeness, rather just looking at form and tones is supremely hard to do, I want to make a likeness, but the struggle makes me feel alive. THERE IS MORE WORK TO BE DONE ! There is always more work to be done, I thank God for having eyes to see what we have around us. Paul.

Dear Monty, I dip in to your Tweets from time to time, and I realise now that you see like a painter and that your garden and words are your paint. I have come to this conclusion because I have just finished reading 'Cezanne a life' by Alex Danchev. Cezanne spent a lifetime searching, crafting and sculpting with paint. In comparison with him I am a dog ! I look for crumbs from the masters' table, the smallest of crumbs will do. I am probably best when left to unthinking monotony - to the just get on with it that work provides - no time to think, by work I mean the salaried job.  Drawing, painting and gardening all require reflection. Strange to call making art 'work' - it is toil, but delicious toil. Cezanne could see something beyond the surface of life. There are two parts to man, the material and the spiritual. It seems Prof Brian Cox can too : "There is something special about life - something else, like an animating force or a soul or w...

Dear Monty, Life among the dry things became the title of our evening around shells and stones. There are many dry things in our lives - dry bones - the shells of past experiences, love, passion and playfulness all turned to stone. But there in the midst of all the dryness is a bulb bursting into life - with curve and curl of green. Even the dry quartz pebble riddled with iron veins comes to life like flesh when moistened. Here is a metaphor for our own existence - in a simple gathering of artists. We came to this still life dry, but were revived by water, word and laughter. The simple and beautiful things are often the most valuable. I think that Andrew Graham-Dixon's summing up of Lombardy on BBC2 last night was incorrect - in the sense that the riches of the region are not found in Gucci or even the amazing architecture and modernity, but in the polenta and the rustic casserole. The greatness was in the produce, and the pearl of great price is the simplicity and lo...

Dear Monty, I have started a 'painting' - really it is mixed media, drawing, fresco and sculptural relief. Anyway, a waterfall, or the memory of a waterfall. Some of the elements I am happy with, others not. I turn it on its side - and in so doing I see the force of the water more acutely than when vertical. Writing about this striving for pictorial harmony, Pissaro is quoted in 'Cezanne a life' by Alex Danchev - " When I start a painting, the first thing I strive to catch is its harmonic form. Between this sky, this ground and this water is necessarily a link. It can only be a set of harmonies, and that is the ultimate test of painting...The big problem to solve is to bring everything, even the smallest details of the painting, to an integral whole, that is to say harmony." Cezanne is quoted as saying - "Art is a harmony parallel to nature" The above quotes are the best descriptions I have read describing the internal struggle of c...

Dear Monty, I look out at the garden having been out there on this mild dank day. There are signs of new life even before the old has passed. I look out and reflect, and see a design - I see an arch, I see punctuation and I see meeting trees. I see a palette, I see a picture which has a kind of pleasing balance for me. I look out and look in. I read about the life of Cezanne and seeing him stare out from the dust jacket of Danchev's book - makes my heart leap - and exercises my mind and spirit. His gaze is a gaze of a man questioning himself. 'Let a man examine himself.' Emile Zola writing to Paul Cezanne and quoted in 'Cezanne a life' by Alex Danchev (which I think you have read) says this : 'it's only rocks that don't change, that never depart from their rock nature. But man is a whole world; anyone who wished to analyse one individual for one day would be overcome by the work.' ! Another Paul said this : ' I do not even ...

Dear Monty, I feel the need to celebrate light, just like many others today.  Nature is transfigured by light, and this is refelected in my spirit. I, like many of us had to get out there and breathe it. Paul.