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Inspired By Art
The work of artists
like Monet, Poussin and Kandinsky inspires Stephen Anderton
to think of new approaches to colour, form and structure
in the garden
Some gardeners see
a painting in a gallery or a book and say, “That’s
how I want my garden to look. That’s what I want
to recreate.” It’s true, making gardens
is rather like making pictures. The difference is that
gardens are constantly changing. Things move in the
wind, and come up and flower, and die down again. Or
even just die on you. A garden is a walk-in picture,
where things are seen not just from one side of a picture
frame but from constantly changing angles. And the design
has to work from all those angles and viewpoints. It
ain’t easy, as we all know.
But still the temptation
is there to try to make that garden look just like the
painting. To freeze the frame. It’s not a good
way to work. Or at least it’s a bit of a cop-out,
because it avoids dealing with all that constant change
in a garden. What you can do however, much more successfully,
is to draw things from a painting, to pull out the essence
of how it works, and translate that into garden terms.
Use it as inspiration, not just something to copy slavishly.
Different painters
have different ideas to offer. Monet was a gardener
and a painter, and his gardening inspired his painting
and vice versa. His garden at Giverny
with its famous water lily pond (below) has been an
inspiration to thousands of gardeners and painters alike
(eg the garden at Godinton,
above). But what you might pull out from his style of
painting could be the way he uses colour, planting your
space like his canvas not with big clumps of single
colours but with a very mixed planting, creating many
small points of bright colour to blend together and
make an impression of brilliance. Pink and yellow -
the colours of light! It might teach you that one colour,
pale yellow perhaps, could be used lightly throughout
a garden, as an undercoat to splashes of stronger colours.
For centuries gardeners
have admired the landscape paintings of Claude
and Poussin,
for the way they produced such well-balanced pictures
of craggy, natural landscapes, with interest in the
foreground (people perhaps), and buildings to draw the
eye to the middle ground or distance (like Stourhead,
below). The work of these painters was the inspiration
for a whole generation of landscapers in the 18th century,
but the lesson applies as much to a small garden as
to a large one. Every garden needs to contribute to
a balanced and satisfying picture.
You can find that
balance in other ways of course, from painters like
Mark Rothko or Ben Nicholson, working in simple planes
of bright or minimal colours. The lesson here is to
see how the adjoining shapes and volumes interact.
You might take inspiration
for a whole garden plan from a painter such as Kandinsky,
seeing how his circles and rectangles and lines bind
together to make a satisfactory whole. You might treat
one of his pictures as a kind of ‘wiring diagram’
for a garden, a way of producing a pleasing sequence
of hedged alleys and enclosures. No one would ever know
unless you told them, but that is sometimes the secret
of real inspiration.
Be inspired...
take
a look at the books in our store
Find out...
how to
use colour in your garden
how to
use objects in borders
Articles
reprinted with premission from Greenfingers.com
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