The Rose Garden
Interview Transcription
in relation to work shown in the solo exhibition: The Rose Garden Vol 1 MMXVI
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
2017
GU: I built my studio upon a marshy field.
Over the years as I have painted, I have continued to cultivate the ground and plant a garden around it… broadleaf trees, an orchard…and the rose garden. They are not separate. The garden is like another studio. It is an extension of it. They are one and the same thing and I move between the two freely all the time; observing, gardening…and painting.
I know my garden intimately. It is a quiet place where I can observe time passing. The vision of the paintings and the garden are inseparable. Working both simultaneously is a daily practice.
The process of gardening and painting are very similar. I breed my own roses. The garden began with about one hundred different varieties of rose and from that I have cross bred almost three hundred more. It takes time. I have collected hips and seeds from many places. I collected hips from Orkney and Rome. I brought them home and waited three years for them to grow into a recognizable plant. Gathering the knowledge and expertise you need to paint as you would wish, is the same. You must give it much care and attention. You must toil and you must be patient. There can be both success and failure and there are moments of triumph. It is an on going work. The practice of painting is always becoming and never arriving. The paintings mark points in time. Each body of paintings is a calendar – the titles are dates. The natural light that falls on the subject, the atmospheric conditions and the seasons change from moment to moment and I paint it. One painting leads to another and another…it is a journey.
When I see the rose garden on a midsummer’s morning, to behold it is never enough…the complexion, the perfume, the dew, the ambience - I wish to possess it, to capture it. The vision of it will end; it doesn’t last long. Tomorrow morning it will be different. I can never possess it, but I can paint it. Not illustrating it, but isolating fragments, rendering specific details of it in particular chosen combinations. And the combinations are many - of colour, rhythm, reflected light and illusionary space - all the things that interest me in painting.
I like to express an immediate response to nature, a little like the way the impressionists did, but also ‘being nature itself’ as were the abstract expressionists.
I relate to the romantic movement of landscape painting and to the work of the romantic poets. Like Burns, Keats or Shelley, I too use nature by which to express my feelings about the world around me, and my connection with it…or about anything. With the Quercus and Lapis painting series’, the palette was considerably reduced in order to focus on other painting elements such as rhythm and pace of line. Roses in the landscape have been one cause for the reintroduction of more colour. They are a most becoming subject by which to express emotion through colour. The rose can so beautifully and sensitively illustrate the emotions of a person. It is like a human life, a rose plant…it has a tangible beginning, middle and end through the flowering season. A rose can go on for generations by propagation, yet the blooms themselves are both fragile and fleeting.
These are physical paintings. You cannot ignore their volume and weight. I can foresee whether or not they will wrinkle or crack. Wrinkling or cracking is acceptable to me. I must work with the nature of the paint. I must accept the paints natural behaviour but I must understand it skilfully well, so that I can have control over it.
There is little chance in my painting. I figure out the behavioural patterns and unpredictable elements that cause things to happen one way rather than another. When I am making a piece of work I am almost never out of control. My mark making is specific. I’ve painted so many marks in my life that I can predict what a mark is going to look like before I’ve made it. By how the paint hangs off my brush and with what viscosity…I know what personality that mark will have, how fast or how loosely it will move…I know how a particular volume of paint will perform by exactly how I apply it. A painting is at first liquid and moveable. The paint can be pushed and folded wet through wet and can capture a sense of movement in the air and how the breeze moves the plants…and then the paint sets. A moment of time is suspended as it cures. My colour diaries speak about the same thing…time passing.
The colour is the same. I know precisely what the effect will be, how a colour will respond when I lay another chosen colour down next to it or on top of it or underneath it. I layer thick pillows of paint. I can excavate from the top surface down to the base stratum in order to reveal hidden colours if I wish, or to retrieve a foundation colour in order to mix with it with one poured on the surface. The colour works to stimulate the senses in a very specific way because I have chosen the combinations very carefully. The intended harmony or discord they create is a result of colour perception accumulated over years. I know because I practice.
I do not restrict myself safely to any one process but do also deliberately enforce new ones, testing my materials again and again, allowing them to reveal endless new visual possibilities.
There is a consistency in my process. I start a painting and I finish it. I don’t take a painting into another day. I would rather scrape a painting off and start again the next day. This is because the subject tomorrow will be dissimilar. All the elements will have changed. Nothing stays the same for very long. And me, I will feel differently. And so, a new painting must be fabricated.
It’s about a moment lived, a moment felt. My personal aim is to capture a moment of intense feeling. When my feelings, the material of the paint, and the subject I’m looking at fuse together as one, the result is utterly unique. When the moment passes it’s gone forever but the object, the painting, remains. I can never re-create it. A painting is not the original experience, but it can draw emotion and memory.
I will paint other landscapes, seascapes, people and things…or just colour. I will paint whatever is in my life, wherever I go. But the rose will always be significant. It encapsulates everything I need in a subject. It is beautiful but also thorny. It is lovely, seductive and tragic. It has a life. It is growing and changing.
In the life of a gardener it is at the end of that life that the gardener may behold and reflect upon his gardens final moment of glory – all through his life it is an ever-changing work in progress. It is a symbol of human endeavor; a labour of love…that’s painting too.