The canvas is like a blank field, waiting for seeds to be planted. However, the role of a 'gardener' needs to be extended. A gardener, prior to my understanding of the myriad of characteristics a gardener could have, needs to be patient, observant, needs to collaborate with garden and not work on it, but with it.
The garden, the field is not a passive entity but a living and thriving one dependent on us as we are of it. By recognising this, the gardener must respect the garden and let it thrive without constantly manipulating it in ways that don't seem 'natural' to that context.
As a painter, who has been dabbling with gardening, often I bring in these 'gardener' traits to the field of the canvas. By observing, waiting, thinking before I 'plant', 'pull out', 'weed out' a figuration, a gesture, make a mark on the field of the canvas.
Under a compost methodology, many gardeners swear by 'no-dig' methods. Essentially 'no-dig' is respecting and disrupting the soil and the compost, as little as possible. To dig or till is to disrupt the layers of complex interconnectivity of microbial activity which resides in the compost/ soil.
By avoiding 'digging' into the field of the canvas, conceptually it renders to avoiding disrupting the intricate layers of figurations, abstractions, sensitivities, gestures, that are archived into the canvas field over time.
with careful observation, careful 'planting', 'scattering the seeds' of ideas, gestures and mark-making, one need not to disrupt the field, pull out weeds. And thus there is a reciprocated respect embedded in the process of painting.
Well then, can I paint a garden?
YES!
I think so?
I am really interested in the idea of swapping methodologies with painting and garden, under this methodology of the compost.
Sarah Smuts Kennedy has created a Pasture painting project, where creates a space within a lawn-field context by cutting out a shape. She utilizes this 'no-dig' method, and then plants cover - crops that sequester carbon and creates soil biology.
In terms of 'painting' in a garden, I find her approach really interesting because she uses the methodology of a painting discipline methodology to explore the niche between art and activism.
As an artist who has been continually thinking about her carbon footprint, and how efficiently I can reduce it, especially in my practice, without my art representing 'sustainability', the niche been art and activism has proved an interesting context.
How much political agenda must one have with the right balance of 'art- methodology aesthetic', so that the work is not bound in representation, neither is it being solely aesthetic-based?
At the moment, I have bee practising conventional organic gardening methods. I am not entirely sure how I can experiment with a painterly methodology into the garden. I think this isn't a problem, I am excited.
The garden is such a physical, tactile space, it feels more akin to sculpture methodologies than painting sometimes.
I love the physicality and 'labour of love'feeling working with the garden.
I don't have an answer yet for this space, but I hope to experiment with possibilities in the coming future.
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