It was the very idea of the garden which had conjured up the magic and the fascination in the first place’

 

My childhood garden- I have no photos but a strong memory of it in my head and heart. Through the back door you walk out onto a patio, pass a church pew covered in ivy and up a step with stone spheres on either side to a half acre of green. There was a statue of a lady, a panda by the bamboo and fruit trees: apples, plums and pears. 

 

I would play in the garden for hours, making up games, collecting sticks and leaves and petals and watching the dust when the sun would sparkle through it. We all have  memories of childhood, memory is unique to us and memory shapes our world. 

 

In terms of painting- Maybe we want painting to take us away from the world or maybe we want it to show us more of the world, of ourselves and to evoke memory, time and space…

 

Here in Cornwall, the days when a storm is raging and rain is falling, are the days when my mind is most clear for painting. I’d begin and enjoy the feeling of the colours gliding on the surface of the canvas- a world of possibilities, it could go any which way it chose to. It was the theme of gardens, figures, flowers and they would make their appearance, they would recur. After a while I would turn to the Impressionists books or older paintings I had made for reference.

 

Dreams of gardens, flowers, figures all come into existence. Gardens are a kind of utopia, a place of memory, love and healing, flowers are symbols of different parts of ourselves that we want to hold onto or forget, the figure is there because it’s you and you’re seeing the work and being in it and because that’s how we see the world.

 

The bottom line is to convey love, beauty, nature. The premise is to try to make a beautiful painting. All of this must be included and balanced but out of balance and to feel that it is conclusive and that it is finished or that it has arrived from somewhere else and into this world.

 

Painting gardens is a pursuit, whereby through observation of the seasons and cycles we learn that we are almost, if not quite, like them, for they grow as we do throughout the years. Still life seemed cruel because the flowers were already dead, had been picked and placed in a jug or vase of water, they were observational, it felt strange to paint those.

 

More recently I have begun to include the figure, I want to suggest an understanding of the seasons and cycles of our human form. I mean myself, you, all the many people I had to be when I faced each day. All the women, all the men, all the children that need to find some solace and a space to dream within a changing world. 

 

Spring 

 

The promise of new life

Day light’s staying longer now

Feel the heat upon your skin

Face up to the sun

You are stronger now

Feel the greenness coming in

​

 

It means a lot to be a women painter, to follow the footsteps of female painters. Throughout history, art was male dominated but women painters found a way through. What does it mean to be a female artist painting gardens, flowers and the figure?

 

In Cornwall it meant a lot to be a painter of such things- to break away from the tradition of plain air painting and seascapes. I loved these too and knew them well. I never understood why artists lost focus on our historic and rich garden culture. Our unique micro climate enabled us to house and protect some very rare species of flowers and trees dating back to the Victorian times of the famous plant hunters.

 

Here in West Penwith, springtime came early before it travelled up country. The promise of spring was such a joy that you could almost feel your heart jump up into your throat with happiness and relief. Thoughts of circling cartwheels, feeling hands pressed upon a carpet of soft grass, hair whizzing past shoulders, legs in the air until you land, the colours of the world spinning round. It was the desire to sit on the beach and eat an apple in the sun!

 

Life was beginning to pulsate, you could see this in the flowers and the grass- if you looked at a borage closeup for its whiskers and blue veins would show it. Snowdrops, daffodils, primroses, hyacinths, blue bells, garlic, scarlet pimpernel would be radiant and buds of fox gloves promised to later show themselves in June.

 

The triumph of spring was really the reward of making it all the way through winter and back again to feel the new life coming in. The glory was to watch in anticipation as the bulbs that had been planted in November and then forgotten about and then remembered again reveal themselves. Life would get busy and so this idea of the ‘garden’, offered a space for retreat. 

 

When you look into the world of a painting you take the colour, the texture, the way the forms are laid out and the story of it. Studying a painting, you can find an escape and a way to rest and to dream. Each time you look at a painting, you will notice something more and it will change throughout the day, the season and the years.

 

Spring was exciting. It was filled with pressure too. All the paintings worked on through winter had to be ready, finished, titled, framed. They began to make sense as a greater story of six months of hard labour, they had to stand up on their own and as individual pieces.

 

Every day that came by was a tease, so changeable, could you feel the warmth of the sun this time? Would the day stay overcast. Would the fog come in because the land was warming up and a sea mist was blowing in?

​

Summer

 

Daylight spins me round again

Let me sit and slumber 

I’m in your presence 

For a minute more

Bathed upon the light and shade

Of olive trees within your garden 

In the dappled sun of the master

Don’t bring me back

Let me sit and slumber a little more

The olive trees were grainy

They pushed against my skin

For 200 years they observed the painters  life

Don’t let me leave the garden

Two people sit observing

Soaking up the reverence

Their brushes fall on canvas

And still they cannot get near him

Let me stay in your garden

And soak up your light and life

The sun is burning strong

The shadows are purple, violet, crimson 

Daylight spins me round again

Let me sit and slumber 

For a minute more

But a child’s voice strikes my heart

Her golden hair, soft skin, green dress 

Appears from the shadows of the ochre house 

A boy next to her

My children 

Awake me from my dream

But let me sit and slumber for a minute more

Under the olive tree in your garden

Daylight spins me round thrice more

It pushes me to go

My memory lives in your garden

Daylight spins me round again

 

​

Gardens are places with boundary markings- these could be pathways, walls, hedges. The meaning is the same- to keep the garden safe and protected from weather or animals for example, and by doing so creating a space for the life of the plants to flourish.

 

Boundaries in gardens are a perimeter by which everything is possible inside. They create the space for the magic of the life of plants to form in an infinite way particularly if you find plants that thrive in the correct conditions you have made for them. I was a terrible gardener so I painted the plants and flowers while attempting and failing to grow them.

 

The boundary is much like the edges of a canvas. Bear with me. The edge of a canvas for an artist is always in the way. It marks the outer world and when we paint we want the inner. So the edge of the canvas is the boundary hedge and inside of this is the garden, where everything is possible in the world of colour, composition, marks, style etc…

 

Places of nurture, a gardener tends to his sacred space from the first moment of digging a flower bed, shovel to soil. All the possibilities of what he or she might grow there. And when it is done they must await the suspense, the fruits of their labour, to see the first shoots, buds and colour that promise the flowers to come. Gardens signify the coming of new life and the cutting back of old. Once the first work is done, the plants do the rest of the magic. 

 

In the same way, the painter has the idea and what must flow once the structure of a painting is made is the colour, brush mark and bringing to life- through memory and time spent training or growing and being with the paintings. 

 

Figures were a historical subject for painters. Take the delicately painted flesh by Renoir in the golden light of the south of France, take the heavily worked oils by Van Gogh. In Renoir’s paintings I could smell the garden and the body just by looking at his work. In Van Gogh’s paintings I could smell the paint as he sculpted the form of a face. To get to the point at hand it was the symbolism of which much had been written about again and again. These painters and more painters, with time, tried to create some magic in the world. I had begun to see that painting is a beautiful thing to do to pass the time while living on this earth.

 

A flower- take a rose- would symbolise purity and beauty and could be likened to a young woman for reasons of fertility. Renoir would take the softness of the model’s skin or her long flowing hair and set this as a feature in a garden. The Cornish artist, Laura Knight, in her painting, Marshmallow, focused on the sense of a coastal Cornish garden of a girl in the blooms of the spiring plant.

 

For many of us, gardens offer a space for contemplation, the space to sit and think. The space to dream. They can offer us reflection to look back or to look forwards or for a space of comfort, reliance and hope.

 

Historically they were archetypal images of the soul, of innocence and of happiness. Places for growth of the inner self too. They were closed and ordered spaces even in their chaos.

 

Monet said ‘My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece. I can only draw what I see. Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens’ He meant that he put his best efforts and his experience into creating his garden and this directly influenced his painting.

 

Gardens could host fountains, fruits, bridges, ponds, domesticated animals, people for example as well as plants.

 

Autumn

​

And so there was one cruel thing about the summer:

 It came around too quickly and then it was gone. 

There would be less time to play in the garden 

and so she had to take the flowers inside to enjoy their delicacy, 

the rest would be remembering…

Between Worlds

 

 

I was led by my heart and my mind to think of my childhood garden because- I don’t know about you but- there were simpler times before the masquerade and circus parades of my adult life now.

 

At the bottom of the garden were a set of metal swings with a wooden seat for me and a friend or just me or for my older brother. Then a large tree and a wooden Wendy house with a door and window and a table for playing tea parties.

 

If we climbed the large tree we would get to the tree house my brother made and I could only go up there in secret without him knowing! We were protected from the world by our parents for a short time that was our childhood.

 

In painting terms it was the colours and form and concept I mention which held the fascination. The colours of the greens were always mixed from prussian and cerulean blues and lemon yellows and ochres maybe with a touch of violet. I could never record how they were made, they felt right when I had made them and applied them to the canvas.  Hints of higher notes of pinks or yellows highlighted the light that would shine in.

 

The autumn closing into winter gave me time, a consistency to paint, day after day, between school hours, pick up and drop off. This is where the story deepens since each painting informs the next one and the next.

 

The form was fascinating, heart shaped dewy leaves, the circles of flowers, the act of remembering them from the spring and summer just gone, how the light fell from the sky and through the trees to light up the delicate flesh of the petals. 

 

There was not much point in painting from life as there was no garden that existed in this world that I was painting- it was the feeling and the symbolism that I was after. Something that would leave you and the viewer with a sense of the magical place or of the respite that you may be seeking.

 

The paintings may seem ornamental at first glance, this is the point of them, to covey a beauty and a mastering of paint was the intention. Under the surface is the veil of time, I hope. Of us turning and changing seasons like the flowers, of us growing towards the light, of us wilting gloriously I hope, with time. While we get on each day the world turns as does the garden we are in or we use to find a solace in the world…

 

Winter

 

The garden was first and foremost within us all along, 

even if we sat wondering where it had gone to 

and most importantly when it would come back.

 

 

There was a strange feeling these days that none of this would last forever. All those days and nights of tending to my young children never before had this lack of intensity and at the same time it overwhelmed me. Of course I was still responsible for them but their growing sense of self at 9 and 11 years had seen them come into their own already. There was still weeding to be done but the structure, the structure of our life was clear, it was like this.

 

Now I could begin to watch and guide their lives as they began to bloom. Watching them grow-up was frightening and fascinating. Decisions on what to wear, on schools and sports and food etc. Their perspectives and outlooks and opinions from way out of the blue and those stern eyes as they look at me in the van. We talk most looking out into the world and in a row as I drive. I didn’t have the capacity in me to grow up as much as them and the child in me roared more than ever. They would even tell me off nowadays and what a cheek!

 

Aging was suddenly becoming aware of the seasons of life when one still feels 28 but doesn’t look it anymore and is now 40 years of age. The same pain in my back and shoulder or example when I move lots of paintings is still there but hurts more. Scarily I realise there may be a time when I can’t make large paintings and I fear forgetting painting titles and all the paintings I have made, though this would likely be a long way off.

 

To drive up the camellia lane to the studio every day in the winter was magic. It would be February when their flowers would illuminate against a grey sky and green hedges. The structures of other plants and shrubs remained as a reminder of warmer seasons. There was a quietness and stillness to these months. 

 

I would marvel at the large and ancient rhododendron trees, their trunks covered in moss and their structures bare reaching up to the sky. For they could tell a story of times gone by as they stood rooted in the Cornish earth. 

 

I would approach the courtyard, get to the studio door, turn the key in the lock and walk in. I was greeted by the colours on the canvas that seemed to me like the memory of the spring and summer just gone and imagining the seasons to come. I would begin again, another day of painting, like the day before and the day tomorrow.

 

Francesca Owen is an award-winning painter. A former student and recipient of two scholarships from the Slade school of fine art, including the Euan Uglow memorial scholarship and a full member of the St Ives Society of Artists.

 

Francesca’s paintings are now held with collectors and galleries across the U.K, Europe and America.