Painting ‘Art Garden’

Large alcohol ink paintings

The August studio workshop was focused on painting ‘Art Garden’. Enveloped in the tranquility of ‘Zen garden’. Waterfall murmuring in sink with our voices, hummingbirds feeding on monarda’s blooms, critters milling around in early rush for fall preparations, stone Budas sleeping peacefully in shadows of late summer flowering… Summer rain, refreshing, welcomed by the garden plants, surprisingly, brings a sense of adventure.

Our ‘Art Garden’ installation are two collective paintings, each 20×26″ – a true challenge for the technique – exploring two artistic approaches to create ‘a garden’. One is a principle of ‘all-over’ painting, concept that emerged in relation to the “drip” paintings of Jackson Pollock and the “automatic writing” or “abstract calligraphy” of Mark Tobey in the 1950s. Lee Krasner, one of our ‘Close to Heart’ female artists was masterful in applying this technique to her bigger than life paintings. The surface of the painting is treated in uniform manner without a dominant point of interest or any indication of which way is “up.“ Dynamics is achieved by the rhythmical interplay of objects and colors and their light values.

Our first garden was planted as if you look at the field of flowers from a bird’s eye vantage point, extending beyond the painting surface into infinite space – our own exercise in all-overness.

Our second garden is grown as a composition – light, shade, perspective, color interplay in the flower bed – not unlike growing a true garden. Flowers are seen perpendicularly (not atop), and are bursting with color – they are individuals but also a group joined together through some basic principles of composition – the flow of colors and light focusses the attention towards the center, providing a sense of depth.

Garden is an art in itself- in many ways created using principles similar to those of painting – a backbone of composition, balance, layers of texture, light and shadow, dynamics, repeated patterns, depth and perspective, colors, complementary and contrasting. Garden is an ever-changing environment, seasonal blooms revealing unexpected transformations, a tri-dimensional canvas with many different view vistas. Can painting ever reproduce subtleties and complexities of a garden ‘canvas’? A life cycle? Create a ‘visual mood’ that can trigger a recollection, emotions, celebration of all of the above?. Did we touch that ‘nerve’ in our Art Garden? Planting it together…