A Colourful Life: How Gardens Inspire My Paintings

Gardens have long been an important source of inspiration for my work. They offer an extraordinary combination of colour, structure, pattern and unpredictability – a meeting point between human creativity and the natural world.

My exhibition, A Colourful Life, at St Andrew's Church in Corbridge brought together a collection of paintings inspired by my visits to gardens and marked my return to a subject that continues to fascinate me.

Returning to gardens

I first spent an extended period exploring gardens as a subject for my paintings several years ago, visiting gardens across the UK and northern France and working directly from the landscapes I encountered.

More recently, I felt drawn back to them.

But although the subject may be familiar, the way I approach it has evolved.

When I visit a garden now, I'm not necessarily looking for a picturesque view that I can reproduce on canvas. Instead, I'm interested in what makes me stop and look: an unexpected combination of colours, the rhythm of planting, contrasts between light and shadow, or the relationship between carefully designed structures and plants growing freely around them.

I make sketches and studies while I'm there, gathering colours, shapes, marks and impressions that I can take back into my studio.

These become the raw ingredients for the paintings that follow.

From a garden to a semi-abstract painting

My finished paintings are not intended to be literal representations of particular gardens.

Although they begin with real places and experiences, I gradually move away from observation as a painting develops.

Back in the studio, I combine my location studies with photographs and memories of being in the garden. Shapes become simplified, colours intensify and layers are added and removed. Elements of the original landscape remain recognisable, while others dissolve into abstraction.

This allows me to concentrate on something I find much more interesting than simply recording what a garden looks like: how it feels to be there.

The resulting paintings are semi-abstract, vibrant and deliberately optimistic.

Discovering the patterns within nature

My return to gardens has also coincided with a growing interest in the geometry and patterns found throughout the natural world.

Look closely at a flower, leaf or seed head and extraordinary structures begin to reveal themselves. Spirals, circles, repeating forms, symmetry and mathematical relationships occur everywhere in nature.

This has led me to explore sacred geometry and the Golden Ratio within my paintings.

I often introduce geometric structures into the early stages of a work, sometimes allowing them to remain clearly visible and sometimes partially obscuring them beneath subsequent layers of paint.

For me, these patterns aren't simply decorative.

They suggest something beneath the visible landscape – an underlying order or interconnectedness that we may not immediately see but can perhaps experience when we spend time surrounded by nature.

Where human creativity meets nature

Gardens are particularly fascinating to me because they are neither entirely natural nor entirely human-made.

Someone has designed them. Plants have been chosen, paths created, borders shaped and colours considered. Yet nature continually pushes against that structure. Plants spread, flowers fade, seasons change and carefully controlled spaces become unpredictable.

There is a wonderful tension between the two.

It also connects with a much broader theme running through my work: the relationship between people and the natural world.

How do we shape nature – and how does nature shape us?

Painting optimism

Colour has always been central to my work, and the paintings in A Colourful Life celebrate it unapologetically.

I don't necessarily use colour exactly as I see it. I exaggerate, intensify and alter it in response to the feeling I want a painting to convey.

Ultimately, I want my paintings to have an uplifting quality.

There are serious ideas behind much of my work – our relationship with nature, environmental responsibility, spirituality and our need for connection with the landscape – but I don't believe those subjects always need to result in sombre paintings.

For me, celebrating the extraordinary beauty, energy and resilience of the natural world can itself be meaningful.

A Colourful Life brought many of these ideas together in one place: gardens, colour, abstraction, pattern and my continuing fascination with what happens when we stop simply looking at a landscape and begin to experience it.

You can watch the accompanying video for a glimpse inside the exhibition and see some of the paintings that formed part of this colourful chapter in my work.