The Artist’s Garden: Reshaping the Landscape

Abstract

This practice-led research in painting investigates the artist's garden tradition and explores formal aspects and distinctive features of garden culture which I have observed in Australia and in England. My relationship to my own garden and my reflections on the processes of gardening are central to this project. I discuss the philosophical and conceptual underpinnings of my relationship with gardening and describe the processes of making garden landscape paintings of a variety of garden types, ranging from large formal English estate gardens visited on fieldwork, to much smaller private gardens in places such as Newcastle, Moree and the Blue Mountains. Parallels are drawn between the art of gardening and the art of painting.The resulting body of work includes numerous en plein air paintings as well as large-scale studio paintings, and I discuss the practical and aesthetic issues involved in working between these two modes. Two key artist gardeners feature for discussion and analysis: John Glover and Stanley Spencer. My reflections on garden design traditions and gardening as a practice have been informed by several valuable texts, two of the most significant are Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition which gives a broad-ranging philosophical account of our human connection to gardens; and the collection of writings compiled in The Genius of Place: The English Landscape Garden, edited by John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, which gave me a better understanding of the development of the English garden landscape.