Stripping the tendrils

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Dear Monty,

I'm not sure how long you intend having a cyber holiday, but I thought I would write anyway.

Jake and Dinos Chapman said : " If you can't spend a day chucking clay at a wall, then you've stripped off a few of the tendrils that are necessary to doing this"

Making art or a garden does involve play, experiment and above all, time out of the usual daily grind. I seem to have stripped off so many tendrils now that I feel as though I am cheating myself and the world by calling myself an artist.

I have rarely drawn the garden, when I have the result has been largely unsatisfactory. Of course you cannot capture the whole garden in one drawing, just as you cannot experience the whole garden from one viewpoint. So what do you draw ?



I have drawn the apple tree with the view beyond the garden before all the trees grew in the valley below. It is one of the few drawings I am happy with. It seems on looking back through my sketch book journal, that I have sketched aspects of the garden more than I first realised.




















I suppose I try and capture a sense of composition or harmony, or a vista through plants and trees that delight me. Monet spent his last years painting light reflection from those lily ponds over and over.

Making pictures and a garden is a mysterious process full of joy and angst.




Paul.

Comments

  1. Gardener in the Distance14 August 2013 at 13:11

    Paul, if it helps any, results are always what someone else has had, not what you know yourself.
    I could argue that I've had some results myself, we having had in Melbourne a benign winter, but then I'd be ignoring the un-doneness: there's absolutely no feeding done to most of the garden; there are a gazillion plants waiting to be potted out; there are whole swathes I'd like to see removed; there's couch grass coming up everywhere, some very ugly views of neighbours, insufficient funds to do any bloody thing and then I've had a tree collapse in the front garden. Bingo!

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