Painting At Goddard’s: Why I Begin My Painting In The Garden

There is something wonderfully exciting about arriving at a garden with a sketchbook and painting materials and having absolutely no idea what I'm going to paint.

On this occasion, I was visiting Goddards in York, looking for inspiration for my next series of garden paintings.

The garden was already bursting with colour, but rather than arriving with a predetermined subject in mind, I wanted to wander, look and wait until something caught my attention.

Finding the subject

I was initially drawn towards the water.

I've painted water lilies and reflections in the past, and there is something about the movement and shifting colours of water that I continually find fascinating.

But I kept exploring.

I'd heard there were some beautiful tulips in the garden and eventually found a group that stopped me in my tracks. There were tulips throughout the garden, but this particular collection had a wonderful array of different colours.

For someone whose paintings are so strongly driven by colour, it was irresistible.

Out came the chair, sketchbook and paints.

Why I paint en plein air

Whenever possible, I like to begin a new painting by working en plein air – directly from the landscape.

I take photographs as well, of course, and they're incredibly useful once I'm back in my studio. But a photograph and the experience of actually being somewhere give me very different information.

A camera records everything within its frame with roughly equal importance.

My eye doesn't.

When I'm sitting in a garden, certain things immediately demand my attention. A particular colour might seem extraordinarily intense. One flower may stand out against everything around it. I might become fascinated by the shape of a leaf, a reflection or the relationship between two completely different forms.

Without necessarily thinking about it, I'm already editing the landscape.

I'm deciding what matters to me and what doesn't.

That process is one of the reasons these initial studies are so valuable when I eventually return to the studio.

Exaggerating colour

I'm also not particularly interested in matching colours exactly.

In fact, I often deliberately exaggerate them.

I use intense inks and other materials that give me wonderfully saturated colours. If I'm looking for a dark green, for example, I might choose something far more intense – perhaps pushing towards turquoise – rather than trying to mix an exact botanical green.

I'm recording the experience of colour rather than creating a colour chart of the garden.

By intensifying everything at this early stage, I have a much more exciting collection of visual information to work from when I begin the finished painting.

Children's materials in a professional artist's sketchbook

Some of my favourite sketching materials are children's paint sticks.

They're quick, wonderfully vibrant and water-soluble, which means I can blend them together and create different effects.

Most importantly, they don't encourage me to become too precise.

When I'm working in a garden, I don't want to spend hours carefully reproducing individual tulips. I want to get down ideas – colour, shape, movement, pattern and energy.

I have no idea at this stage exactly how the study will relate to the finished painting.

And that's intentional.

From observation to abstraction

This initial sketch is really a collection of information.

It's full of the colours that caught my attention, the shapes I found interesting and the marks I instinctively made while surrounded by the garden.

Back in my studio, that information will sit alongside photographs and memories of the day.

Then the translation begins.

Some elements may survive into the finished painting. Others might disappear entirely. Shapes can become simplified, colours pushed further and the original composition changed as the painting takes on a life of its own.

It's through this process that an observed garden gradually develops into one of my semi-abstract paintings.

The finished canvas doesn't need to tell you exactly what I saw at Goddards. I want it to communicate something of what it felt like to be there: full of life, full of colour and full of different shapes and forms.

Seeing rather than simply recording

Perhaps that's the most important reason I continue to work directly from gardens.

Painting forces me to look.

A photograph can remind me what was there, but my sketchbook reminds me of what I noticed.

There is an important difference between the two.

Those decisions – conscious and unconscious – become the beginning of my interpretation of a landscape and ultimately help transform a real garden into something much more personal.

By the time the finished painting emerges, the tulips at Goddards may have become only a distant reference. But their colour, rhythm and energy will still be there somewhere beneath the layers.

You can watch the accompanying video to join me in the garden and see how this initial study develops.

And one final practical lesson from the day: if you're planning to paint outside, take a couple of elastic bands to hold the pages of your sketchbook down.

Particularly if it's windy.

I just need to remember to follow my own advice next time!