Playing in the River

Week two of my art course. This week we found ourselves in Ness woods drawing bits of nature and playing in the river. It sounds like fun, and it was, especially the water bit. 

Goldsworthy

We partnered up and were given a piece of paper with some images from naturalist artist Andy Goldsworthy and then told to go and create something ourselves from what was lying around. The other two teams did land sculptures, one of a fox made from a dead tree stump (it did look like a fox too) and the other team made a floating hoop made from ivy and fishing line. My partner and I opted for the water and made a large circle from the river stones and then a smaller one on the inside. We called it “Going with the Flow” as we thought that didn’t sound pretentious at all.

I realised our piece fell into three art categories. Firstly we drew what we had done, next we made a piece of disposable art (the next heavy rain will see to that) that will catch people’s attention as they walk the dogs and also we made something that wouldn’t have looked out of place as a permanent feature in a garden. It didn’t have to be in the water either; a feature such as this could be filled with herbs or perennials.

Comparisons

Linking art with garden design is even more apparent with the classroom assignment. We have been asked to research and write about the Paris based 19^th century Impressionist Art Movement, which include masters such as Monet and Renoir. Their style of painting was more fluid and painters enjoyed getting out and about experiencing real life situations such as people going about their working day or industrial scenes as well as landscapes as opposed to working from pictures in studios. 

Communal parks were becoming popular for the middle and working classes and this is where a lot of the artists hung out. So the landscapers were instrumental in creating the artists backdrops for their work. Monet himself drew a Japanese bridge hundreds of times, which was actually created in his own garden for convenience. There was a garden designer behind installing that and planting the lilies in the pond too.

Impressionist art, like garden design isn’t linear. The ideas and paintings came from every direction; Turner and Constable were seemingly painting impressionist art some 50 years before the Paris movement and before the phrase was coined and this is just one of millions of examples going all the way back to cave paintings. 

The Impressionist artists were influenced by their surroundings and they were products of their environment (such as the coffee shops in Paris where the Impressionist met up) by travel and each other. 

Like landscape designers, the impressionist artists shocked the world by their radical designs and use of bold colours and apparently unfinished pieces. As new paints were being created and put into tubes for convenience as artists liked to paint outside, so the botanists were travelling the world looking for new plants to brighten up our gardens. Initially they would have been for the upper classes, but eventually filtered down to the folks on the street. This was shocking in its day that these rare and wonderful plants could get into the hands of the working classes Impressionists like to use brash bold strokes to reflect movement and unlike their predecessors who painted smooth, detailed images of religious stories, the Impressionists painted people bathing and doing everyday things like hanging up the washing (Laundry, Berthe Morisot 1875) Shocking stuff indeed.

Clubs

The structure of groups of individuals getting together and creating new ideas is something else that is open to all of us. I’m sure most of us are part of a group of some sort. Even in our own gardening clubs we can come up with some pretty radical new ideas. They may not become a movement that will influence the world, but they are important in the grand scale of things never the less. 

Minimilist

My influence presently comes from some of the Impressionists who, as they got older, simplified their paintings by not putting in anything that wasn’t needed. A figure could be reduced to one brushstroke and a sky could be made with just a few flashes of grey and blue paint. So in my quest for gardening excellence I’m planning to design a complete garden and just put one solitary plant in it. 

That should shock the gardening world.