Painting in the Garden: From Bradley Gardens to the Studio

There are few things I enjoy more than finding a beautiful garden, settling down with my sketchbook and simply responding to what is around me.

On this particular day, I was at Bradley Gardens near Newcastle, enjoying glorious sunshine and looking for inspiration for my next painting. After a wander around the garden – and a lovely breakfast outside – I found a spot that immediately caught my attention.

Finding the starting point

What drew me to this particular view was initially the colour.

The palette was actually quite limited: beautiful purples from the thistle heads sitting alongside soft, creamy whites and greens. But within those subtle colours were wonderful contrasts of shape and form.

Some of the planting was soft and delicate, while other plants created much stronger structural shapes in the background.

This combination of colour, structure and contrast is exactly the sort of thing I look for when choosing a subject.

I don't necessarily want a perfect view or a conventionally picturesque scene. I'm looking for something that makes me stop – a relationship between colours, an interesting shape, a rhythm or a contrast that I can begin to explore.

Why I deliberately paint loosely

Although my finished paintings are created in the studio, working directly from gardens has become an important part of my process.

But these initial studies aren't intended to be finished paintings.

In fact, I deliberately try to make sure they don't become too polished.

I often begin with ink applied using a pipette. It's an unpredictable way of working. The ink can run, drip and create marks that I haven't entirely controlled – and that's precisely the point.

I don't want to become too precious about what I'm making.

Instead, I want to capture my immediate response to the garden: the shapes, colours, forms and energy of the place in their loosest possible form.

I can then take those ideas back into my studio and use them as the starting point for a much larger semi-abstract painting.

Unexpected materials and vibrant colour

I use a wonderful mixture of materials when I'm working in my sketchbook, and some of my favourites aren't necessarily traditional artists' materials.

Inktense sticks are brilliant for introducing really pure, intense colour. They can be used dry, rather like a crayon, or dipped into water to create a much more fluid mark.

I also use children's paint sticks – something I originally discovered through my grandchildren.

They look a little like glue sticks, but they're fantastic for sketchbook work because I can put down strong, immediate marks very quickly. They're water-soluble too, which means I can blend colours together and extend the palette.

Then there are Crayola crayons, another nod to my grandchildren.

These allow me to bring a little definition back into the study when I need it – perhaps emphasising the shape of a particular leaf, flower or plant.

I love the freedom of mixing professional artists' materials with things designed for children. For me, the value of a material isn't determined by how sophisticated or expensive it is. It's about the marks it allows me to make.

Making colour larger than life

There is another reason I particularly enjoy using paint sticks: their colours can be much more vibrant than the colours I'm actually seeing.

That might sound strange when working from observation, but I find it incredibly useful.

When we stand in a beautiful garden, the experience can feel extraordinarily rich and vivid. There is light, movement, colour, scent, sound and the sensation of actually being surrounded by the landscape.

If I simply try to copy the colours I see, some of that energy can become lost in translation.

So I exaggerate.

I might intensify a yellow, strengthen a purple or introduce a colour that isn't literally there if it helps communicate how the place felt to me.

I want the colour to be larger than life because that's often how the experience of being in a beautiful garden feels.

Taking the garden back into the studio

This is where my location studies become particularly valuable.

A photograph can give me an enormous amount of visual information, but it doesn't necessarily tell me what mattered to me when I was actually there.

My sketch does.

The colours I chose, the shapes I exaggerated and even the accidental drips and marks reveal something about my immediate response to the place.

Back in the studio, I can combine those instinctive marks with photographs and memories and begin moving away from the original scene.

The aim isn't to recreate Bradley Gardens exactly as it appeared on that particular day. Instead, I want to use it as the starting point for something more expressive – allowing colour, pattern, shape and abstraction to gradually take over.

Capturing the life within a landscape

Gardens continually inspire me because they bring together so many of the things I'm interested in as a painter: colour, pattern, structure, nature and human creativity.

But ultimately, what I'm trying to capture isn't simply what a garden looks like.

It's the life within it.

The movement, energy, vibrancy and sense of joy we can experience when surrounded by growing things are much harder to photograph or describe – but they are exactly what I want to explore through paint.

This study at Bradley Gardens became another starting point in that continuing process: taking a real landscape, responding to it instinctively and then carrying its colour and energy back into the studio.

You can watch the accompanying video to see the study develop and some of the perhaps unexpected materials I use when working directly from a garden.