Night Gardening

In my diary at the time I wrote, after being moved by Mozart’s music: I’m worrying about my paintings. I wish that I could bring this musical communion feeling to my paintings, to bring the “beyond” into the images so the viewer can transcend the painting image into a personal experience of the meaning, carried by the image. The images hold such deep joy for me, I so love them and I so wish I could paint them “beyond the canvas”, like I feel when listening to Mozart. It seems that the music has really given me an experience of Being and I can apply that to all I behold.”

In late 2014 I began to paint these flowing images into gardens of flowers. The background is still dark, and I felt that I was painting the “Night Garden”. I wanted to show the “garden at night” with its mystery, fragrance and surprises. I still layers blots, splats and drips of paint, continuing to build the image. I started “Art Club” at the VISA school and was given the support to lighten the image up, and to create areas of light and dark, to consolidate areas rather than have overall light against dark.

This January I felt that I had finished the one flower painting. I still wondered about the left hand bottom corner – should I lighten it up a bit or would that distract from the rest of the painting, especially the top right corner where I loved the contrasting colours of the rosy geranium against the light blue/green of the “moonlight”? Our instructor Sarah encouraged me to “push it” more – make it lighter and see what effect that had. I did, and did again about 3 times. I expressed that I was afraid of losing the delightful doodles of colour that were there, and she said that was the problem: I was afraid. I was holding back. She challenged me to make the light parts almost white and the dark parts darker. She showed me a magazine which had paintings, and I realized in our conversation that I keep making it too detailed, I love the detail – the little bips and blobs of colour and how the mix and sparkle. The problem is when I stand back 5 feet – where did it all go? It disappears unless you are a foot away. Sarah showed me how in a large painting the closer you get the more vague it is, the more abstract. She suggested I work bigger or put four of these sized canvases together and make one big painting, and then divide it into four. I see how I get lost in the delightful detail. I see how it gets lost when you stand back from it. I see how that can be backward to how “successful” paintings work : they grab you from across the room because from 10 feet they give you a powerful image that is lost when you get 1 foot away! So I took photos and then squinted my eyes and painted swaths of white and swaths of dark on areas of the painting so that there were larger movements of light and dark. When we hung it, the paint flowed down and created “stems” which were much more vague and ambiguous. Sarah said it might be a stream sparkling with light, it might be the constellations – its more up to the viewer to interpret, which includes the viewer and doesn’t spell it out. Defining it more ends up making it less alive and interactive by making it more concrete and limited. When an image is ambiguous there are more layers, or meaning that can be discovered by the viewer, because I am not saying “these are flowers.”