In The Garden, A May Morning

The Light of  the Garden of Eden was a soft luminous yellow coming from the East, the direction of morning.  For Jan Van Eyck to Vermeer that morning light came through a window on the left side of the painting.  A Dutchman in the 1600s knew the window rested on  the Eastern wall of the room spreading the light of Morning.  The appeal of  Eden or Paradise is its garden setting.  We get our word paradise from the ancient Persians, a walled enclosure, a safe place suitable for a garden.  Past the garden the world is less beautiful and safe.  Artists across time and cultures were compelled to depict gardens.  Our contemporary  garden painting  tradition begins with French Impressionists.  Americans from Childe Hassam to John Singer Sargent followed their precedents.  Sargent makes garden painting a private affair rarely showing or selling his small garden experiments in oil and watercolor.  An obvious influence was Sargent’s friendship with Monet and his visits to Giverny.   Sargent explores gardens earlier in England as in the oil in  example 1 from 1879.  This oil garden study reveals Sargent’s interest in the  spontaneous, gestural,  bravura strokes of artists like Frans Hals and Velazquez.   He will use these strokes in his watercolors as well.  By the mid 1880s Sargent frequently makes other garden studies as you see in example 2, poppies.   Here his point of view is level with the poppies.  The background  is dark imitating the tradition of portrait artists using dark backgrounds.  Sargent travels widely in Europe and finds intimate garden subjects in Majorca in 1908. Example 3 shows Sargent’s   watercolor of gourds in Majorca.  His point of view now is quite close and looking up.  Example 4 is  a photo of mine which I took thinking of Sargent’s watercolor.   A year earlier in 1907 Sargent was touring Tuscany with  his usual retinue of friends and manservant.   He found inspiration  in the  Tuscan gardens of Collodi , the Boboli in Florence (see example 5  of Sargent’s watercolor followed by example 6 of my photo), and gardens of Frascati near Rome.  I have visited these gardens following in Sargent’s footsteps.

Example 1. Sargent  corner garden, oil.

Example 2.  Sargent oil, poppies.

Example 3. Majorca gourds, watercolor.

Example 4. My photo

Example 5. Sargent Watercolor in Boboli.

Example 6. My Boboli photo.

On a recent  May Morning I wandered about our own garden, my wife Rebecca Hoefer is the gardener  here.  I discovered the light of Eden was all about.  It provided a luminous backlight to some fading daffodils on the edge of our forest, example 7.  Here is how I proceeded step-by-step through another garden painting and later, I’ll show you how I  tried to abstract my experience.   I begin with  a series of photos. You see two versions on the left in my first step, example 8.  I apply ultramarine blue on a 36×36 piece of white 3mm Dibond anodized aluminum.   I move to example  9, which represents step 2.  Here I applied gamboge yellow  to the upper area and blended it with the edges of the ultramarine blue.  In example 10, step 3,  you see  my brush which is a 6″ soft synthetic nylon flat . I generate a texture by lifting the paint as I pat the flat side of this brush in multiple directions across the surface. In example 11, step  4, I have outlined shapes with my finger and a Bounty paper towel.  In example 12, step  5, you see further  outlining of shapes.  Example 13 represents step 6.   This is as far as the painting has come.   I added semi-opaque whitish pink glazing to upper right light area.  In example 13a I added further glazes.

example 7.  aging daffodils.

example  8. step I, ultramarine blue.

example 9. step 2, yellow and blue.

example 10 .step 3, texturing.

example 11. step 4, shapes.

example 12. step 5 more shapes.

example 13. step 6.

example 13a. after glazing.

After  more garden paintings ( see examples 14 and 15) trying different proximities to my subject but, all seen from about the height of a Robin’s eye I  consider abstracting the subject.  I try  monochromatically abstracting a  distilled daffodil shape.  Next, I try the process again in  color with squeegees and brushes while over-painting an older image (example 16).  As a demonstration for my  experimental class  “Extending Your Reach” at the Silvermine School of Art (Silvermineart.org) I used brushes and squeegees  on an 18×18″ sheet of aluminum.  I  again over-paint  a previous image whose colors suited my needs.  The squeegee reveals the under-painting’s textures and colors.

example 14. Flora II,36×36.

example 14a. Flora II after glazes

example 15. Flora III,36×36.

example  16. Abstracted Daffodil.

example 18. Class Demonstration.