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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: art

Art in the garden

29 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in design, news, shows

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Tags

art, art history, gardens in art, paintings

kandinsky_murnauthegardenII1910

Kandinsky: Murnau the Garden II (1910) – at the Royal Academy’s exhibition (love love love this)

Gardens and art walk hand in hand. Gardens inspire art; art inspires gardens. No wonder, really, for both draw their reason for being from instincts for beauty, form and the ability to change the way the person who looks at them views everything that follows.

I’m a bit biased, of course, and I know I’ll scandalise ‘proper’ arty folk, but I’ve always secretly thought gardens the superior art form. Gardens are, after all, four dimensional, to painting’s two and sculpture’s three. Gardens are not only there to be looked at: they are there to be smelled, and touched, and felt. And they exist in fourth dimension, too: that of time. It takes some artist to create a vision that transports the visual and every other sense too, and then keeps it beautiful while it constantly changes with the turning of the seasons.

But anyway, before I start getting too pretentious, the reason I’m going on about this is that anyone who’s a gardener and also likes art (so that’s all of us, then) is positively spoilt at the moment.

nolde

‘Flower Garden’, Emil Nolde, 1922, also at the Royal Academy (love this one too)

I was blown away earlier this year by the Painting Paradise exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, at the side of Buckingham Palace: breathtaking art, garden history and heaven for plant-lovers all in one deliriously happy visit.

And now it’s the turn of more recent paintings to feature gardens: the Royal Academy of Arts is exploring the way gardens led artists from the literal to the impressionistic in ‘Painting the Modern Garden’. Not ‘just’ Monet and Manet, but also Klimt, Matisse, Kandinsky, Van Gogh and – a personal favourite of mine – Mary Cassatt. It opens on 30 January and I will be first in the queue.

edward-chell-exhibition-banner

Edward Chell’s cyanotypes at the Horniman Museum

And there’s more: Bloom at the Horniman Museum is an exhibition of exquisite and other-worldly plant silhouettes created by Edward Chell, inspired by cyanotypes – the same photographic process which produces blueprints – made by 19th century naturalist Anna Atkins (this one closes on 6 December, so get there quick).

strawberrythief_williammorris

‘Strawberry Thief’, William Morris, 1883

At the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (it’s not all London, you know) Rosa Nguyen – last seen making ceramic trees in a London park during the 2013 Chelsea Fringe – is one of the artists featured in The Arts and Crafts House: Then and Now.

Leading light of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, was of course largely responsible for bringing the house into the garden and the garden into the house: his influence spread far beyond wallpaper, and I suspect we owe him much more than we’ll ever realise.

rosa_nguyen

Rosa Nguyen creating her installation ‘Gardening With Morris’ at the Laing Gallery

Then there are the exquisitely detailed paintings of fruits by Shirley Sherwood at Kew Gardens; intricate watercolours of orchids by naturalists The Bauer Brothers at the Natural History Museum; and if your tastes are more hard-core modernist and allegorical there’s always Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds (at the Royal Academy again). What a feast.

Garden words: Gardens as art

22 Friday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in garden words

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

art, Sir Roy Strong

I seem to have been spending an awful lot of time in the 16th century lately.

First it was Adam Nicolson in Arcadia – highly intelligent and full of insights into life in Tudor, Elizabethan and Restoration England, but basically not about gardens. Something of a surprise, since it’s based on Wilton which is, or rather was, one of England’s great iconic gardens. He seemed inexplicably preoccupied with the house and its sundry Earls: just ‘cos they hung out with Henry VIII doesn’t mean they’re more interesting than the garden, you know.

Anyway: now I’m wading into the history of the garden in art, in the company of the erudite and it must be said, himself rather iconic (or should that be iconoclastic?) Sir Roy Strong. Former director of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, and designer of bits of HRH Prince Charles’s garden at Highgrove as well as author of a lot of weighty books and trustee of various charitable trusts. When you read CVs like that it just makes you want to go and curl up under the carpet.

Gardens started appearing in art for the first time in – you guessed it – the 16th century. But before I plunged into Tudor England again, I had Sir Roy’s introduction to read, and that really made me think.

When you seek to picture a garden, do you set out to record an accurate representation of what the garden actually looks like? Or do you seek to capture a mood, a transient atmosphere, the feeling the garden evokes in you when you look at it?

Does it matter if you don’t – ever – record pictures of exactly how the garden looks in its entirety? Does it matter if you get the layout wrong?

The thing is, in the 16th century it really did matter, although they didn’t know it at the time. Gardens depicted in paintings – sometimes merely glimpsed behind the shoulder of a portrait’s subject – are often our only source of historical record on the existence of entire garden styles. Garden historians have pieced together more or less the entire history of the knot garden from throwaway sketches of them in the corners of Elizabethan paintings. And we’re guilty of much the same thing even today, with our ‘plant porn’ photos of pouting paeonies and our moody shots of good-looking corners here or well-planted pathways there.

But perhaps that’s the point. Gardens are art: and if you don’t record it as such, you miss an essential part of their soul. As Sir Roy writes:

“Whether on paper, panel or canvas the garden picture bestows an immortality comparable to the portrait, enabling the viewer to walk through an existing, lost or imagined garden. The artist’s role was essentially to capture this transient and fragile art, one which was subject to the mutation of the seasons and the vicissitudes of time in a way unknown, for example, to a building.“

Avant gardening

08 Saturday Nov 2008

Posted by sallynex in design

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

art, conceptual gardens, Gardens Illustrated, modern gardening, Tim Richardson, Tony Smith

I’ve been a bit preoccupied with Very Modern Gardens lately (just for something I’m writing).

By this I mean what’s rather meaninglessly called Conceptual Gardens by the RHS. What exactly does “conceptual” mean anyway? Aren’t all gardens conceptual – it’s just that sometimes the concept is more usually Gertrude Jekyll than Mondrian…?

Anyway – I’ve always really enjoyed the Conceptual Gardens section at Hampton Court. They’re not only fabulous works of art: they also really challenge what you think you’re seeing and how you think you see it. Did anyone see Forest2 by Ivan Tucker? All those silver birch trees surrounded by mirrors. And the wonderful experience of looking through the holes in the sides only to see your own disembodied face staring back at you, floating somewhere in the air among the trees. And as for Ecstasy in a Very Black Box… This really challenged, with no plants but a load of baby lettuce but probably the best evocation of what it must feel like to be a manic depressive that I’ve ever seen.

So – I’m thinking about all these gardens which are thoughtful and thought-provoking, based on skeletons or what it’s like to be a parent or autumn or, in one case, the Electric Sheep screensaver, and I’m wondering what exactly it’s all meant to be about. I love it as art: much as I love going to Tate Modern and having all my ideas about the way things are turned upside down.

But the middle-aged lady in me says, would you have it in your back garden? I think it’s rather revealing that the champion of avant-gardening, Tim Richardson, recently confessed to Gardens Illustrated magazine that his own garden was full of hardy geraniums. Constance Spry roses and kids’ bikes. I wonder, if Tony Smith offered to come along and paint the whole thing black and put multi-coloured shards of glass in it, whether he’d take him up on it?

I suspect I’m just missing the point here. But I kind of wonder, sometimes, whether there is a point. It may be art – but is it gardening?

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