Finding Inspiration in Unexpected Places: Painting En Plein Air in France

Sometimes inspiration appears in the most unexpected places.

I had been looking for a garden where I could spend some time painting when we drove around a beautifully planted roundabout in France. The display was so full of colour, shape and extraordinary plants that I immediately knew I wanted to stop.

It certainly wasn't the garden I had been looking for – but as a painter, it had everything I needed.

Looking beyond the obvious landscape

I'm increasingly interested in the idea that a painting doesn't have to begin with a conventionally beautiful or picturesque view.

What matters is my response to a place.

Here, it was the combination of colour and structure that initially caught my attention. There was a wonderful range of flowers, but also some incredibly strong architectural forms within the planting.

A tree in the background created triangular, almost pyramid-like shapes, while the more exotic-looking plants in front provided another layer of structure, texture and movement.

These relationships are often what I'm searching for when I work on location.

Rather than thinking about individual flowers or plants, I begin to see the landscape as a collection of shapes, colours, rhythms and contrasts.

Part of my continuing garden series

Although a roundabout isn't technically a garden, this study feels completely at home within my ongoing series of garden-inspired paintings.

I'm fascinated by places where people and nature come together.

A garden is created and organised by people, but the plants themselves continue to grow and change. The same is true of public planting. Someone has made decisions about colour, form, scale and structure, but nature brings movement and unpredictability to that original design.

For me, that's fertile territory for painting.

The location itself becomes less important than the visual experience it provides.

Capturing colour quickly

When I'm working en plein air, speed is important.

I don't want to spend hours carefully reproducing everything in front of me. These studies are about gathering information that I can eventually take back into the studio.

One of my favourite materials for doing this is paint sticks.

They're wonderfully immediate. If I want a strong red, I can put down a vibrant red almost instantly. There is no lengthy mixing or temptation to make the colour completely accurate.

That immediacy helps me respond instinctively.

I'm interested in the colour that caught my attention rather than necessarily matching the precise colour of an individual flower.

Why I intensify colour

Colour in my finished paintings is rarely completely naturalistic.

When I'm standing in front of a beautiful display like this, the experience feels intensely colourful. Simply reproducing the individual colours exactly as I see them can somehow diminish that sensation when they're transferred to paper or canvas.

So I push them further.

Paint sticks allow me to establish those strong colours very quickly, and I then use soft pastels over the top.

The pastels give me the same wonderful intensity of pigment but offer a little more control. I can begin defining particular forms, strengthening areas of colour or introducing marks that respond to the structure of the plants.

It's a balance between spontaneity and control – something that also plays an important role in my larger paintings.

From a quick study to a larger painting

The study I make on location isn't intended to be a finished representation of the scene.

It's a starting point.

Back in my studio, I'll combine it with photographs and my memories of being there. I'll look again at the colours I chose, the shapes I emphasised and the elements I ignored.

Those decisions tell me something important about what originally attracted me to the scene.

From there, I can begin developing a much larger semi-abstract painting.

The individual plants may become simplified. Shapes might be exaggerated, repeated or transformed into pattern. Colours can intensify further and the original view may gradually become less recognisable as the painting develops.

But beneath all those changes will remain the experience of encountering this unexpectedly beautiful planting.

Inspiration really is everywhere

One of the pleasures of being an artist is learning to pay attention.

Famous gardens provide me with enormous inspiration, but they don't have a monopoly on beauty.

Sometimes it's a grand garden at Kew or Wakehurst. Sometimes it's a wild landscape, a stretch of coastline or a view across the North Pennines.

And sometimes it's a roundabout.

That's perhaps the most useful reminder from this particular painting session: inspiration doesn't necessarily appear where you're looking for it.

You just have to notice when it arrives.

You can watch the accompanying video to see me working on location with paint sticks and soft pastels, gathering the first colours and shapes that will eventually feed into a larger garden-inspired painting.

And one final practical tip for anyone planning to take their sketchbook outdoors: if it's windy, remember an elastic band to hold the pages open.

I didn't.