Garden Meditations 2021
Posted on September 9th, 2021 by Jane Fairhurst
L-R, Crepuscule, oil on canvas 100×100 cm, Four Elements, oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm Green Door, oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm, Mock Orange, oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm, Protean, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm, You’ll find me in my garden, 100 x 100 cm
In my Garden Meditations paintings I am exploring light through colour, form and texture and the subject of plants, specifically garden plants.
The intense beauty, the genius loci, that I feel physically when I’m in my garden is the thing I aim to capture in my paintings. Each one vibrant and full of the energy of growth matched in the richness of oil paint used straight from the tube or mixed on the canvas. Compositions begin as al fresco sketches that are then worked up in my studio and developed to reach a moment when I consider the painting finished, balanced and capturing the light of a particular time in the day of a season in constant flux.
The garden has been the subject of artists work since the first gardens were conceptualised and realised in ancient times. The garden is a reverie of civilization, in the western mind a desire to return to the fabled garden of Eden or is it now a place to watch and wait as our climate changes and will it become, like the mythical Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a place imagined, dreamed of and yet unknown?
I play around with scale and simplify the shapes of leaves and flowers to capture the feel of the garden, the pulsing life essence that is growth but that is ultimately doomed to die or perhaps, like Persephone to return with the spring.
Ultimately, the garden remains only whilst the gardener is there to tend it. The painting remains as witness to a time past.
