Artist Statement
Like a Painting or a Poem - words by Maggie McGregor
In this rather grim world, I have increasingly found myself turning to my love of the garden and the amazing resilience of plants and flowers for inspiration. Tennyson wrote in his poem Hamatreya: ‘the earth laughs in flowers,’ pointing out the arrogance of human beings who seek to own and rule the land yet inevitably come to lie beneath it while the plants thrive and cycle with the seasons. In contrast with Tennyson’s rather negative view of human hubris, I feel both artists and gardeners build a garden as an act of faith in the future. Rather than laughing in derision perhaps the flowers are laughing with joy.
There is a long history of artists who have also been gardeners, combining their love for both art and nature. For many, building a garden has been a deeply hopeful act. Derek Jarman, facing his own mortality, scraped out a garden amidst the pebbles of Dungeness, using the land as a form of resistance against death, a way of asserting the value of his life even in the face of inevitable loss. Similarly, Pierre Bonnard, during the grim years of World War I, painted hundreds of quiet and magical gardens, perhaps finding solace in the natural cycle of life.
Artist Mimi Lauter reflects: ‘Something that I’ve learned from painting is that it is a metaphor for our attempt to stay alive, to understand mortality and our own existence…….and that is the same as watching plants grow and die. But as long as you plant something or paint something, there’s hope for the future.’ This sentiment recognises the garden as both a literal and metaphorical space: planting as a symbolic act of hope.
In his work Unquiet Landscape, Christopher Neve writes about the artist Cedric Morris: ‘When a man has part of the world under his hand to reorder it as something according to his own nature, it becomes like a painting or a poem.’ In this way, gardening, like painting, becomes a means of reordering and understanding the world, shaping it in a way that reflects both personal vision and a larger, cyclical natural order. It is through the act of cultivating a garden that one engages not only with nature but with the very idea of creation itself.
Often art and garden are inextricably entwined. Monet, in considering his beloved garden in Giverny, famously declared it to be his greatest work of art. His garden, a living canvas of expressionist colour, form, and light, became an extension of his artistic practice, a place where nature’s strength and beauty could be captured and reinterpreted. In the work of abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell, the bold energetic strokes of the painting parallel the act of gardening and the memory of fields and flowers and gardens.
As Tennyson described in his poem, gardening like painting, is ultimately about control. Decisions need to be made about colour, composition, texture, and form as well as the boundaries of the garden: the fence, the wall, the border that separates the cultivated space from the outside world. The notion of a garden inherently suggests a division between the cultivated and the wild, between order and chaos. In Persian gardens, the walls keep the harsh desert at bay, creating a sanctuary of controlled beauty. As in medieval painting, European gardens historically served to tame the dark wilderness, bringing light and order to the untamed world beyond. Garden designer “Capability” Brown in contrast sought to tame English countryside. Rejecting the formal gardens of Europe, he designed hundreds of romantic, natural-seeming estates, going to extraordinary lengths to create an illusion of wild space.
Perhaps in my exploration of plants and gardens I too am seeking a way to control the forces of our lives. My goal is not to replicate a particular flower or form but to convey through colour and brushstroke the life and hope and irrepressible energy within them. Picasso’s description of art: as 'a form of magic, designed as a mediator between this strange and hostile world and us’ seems particularly apt.
