Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty, if only we have the eyes to see them. John Ruskin
One place we return to year after year is the Shrine Mont oval garden. We either focus on detail or try something more challenging. There is color and texture. There is complexity. By the time we approach this we have been painting a full day with a workshop on Friday. Comfort level has improved and many dive right in.
The wealth of color makes gardens an ideal plein aire subject suiting both broad and detailed approaches depending on whether we focus on a small section or whether we want to tackle something larger. There are artists who spend their entire careers painting flowers or gardens or plants. It is a wonderful way to paint from life without going far, without thinking one has to find that magnificent vista to depict. A simple flower with color that mesmerizes or the mere shape of the leaves or the pedals that attracts your attention can be enough. Once you paint a flower you are unfamiliar with it becomes part of you memory, your mind, and you remember. Painting is a wonderful way to learn about nature, creation, your surroundings.
Many painters are inspired by gardens. Monet, both a gardener and a painter said: My garden is my masterpiece. Along with, I’m only good at two things, gardening and painting. Monet was especially fond of drawing and painting his own gardens. Over and over again, he showed the ways light, weather, season, and time of day visually changed them. By directly observing nature, Monet captured the momentary effects of light and atmosphere. Monet regarded nature as his primary source of emotion. The varieties of flowers and plants he cultivated were chosen for their ability to evoke feelings and create atmospheres.
Another artist of note—a personal inspiration to me—is Fidelia Bridges A prolific artist, she was known for her graceful watercolors of birds, plants, and butterflies. She was considered as the equal of Winslow Homer, one of the most famous American painters of the day; some even regarded her as superior. Henry James, reviewing her paintings on display at the American Watercolor Society’s 1875 exhibition for The Galaxy, an arts and literature magazine, said they were infinitely finer and more intellectual than Homer’s. For most of Bridges’s 50-year career, she worked 10 hours a day, sketching outdoors from spring through fall—in the fields, in the woods and along the marshes in rural Connecticut where she summered and later lived full time. As time allowed, she tended to her beloved garden. Bridges painted well into her 80s, until she could no longer hold a brush. With her, art is no end in itself, Richards, her teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, said in a 1902 Connecticut Magazine article. It is a medium for soul expression. In all her work one hears distinctly the voice of nature speaking in the idiom of art.
