ARGH Gallery

 the current exhibit at ARGH will have a number of pictures including "the happy gardener" theme.   

Happy Gardener has been theme of mine for decades now. The metaphor was not always apparent to me.  The first time I used the gardener in an image it came from the usual unknown space within me. It is this unknowable internal “voice” or “view” that drives my art onward. It is the attempt to merge things in my mind that seem like they should go together but can’t be put together with words that drive me to make images. It is that internal push and pull where things attempt to merge that shows up as the push and pull on the two dimensional surfaces of my canvases. The artist as gardener. The gardeners I present, however, though happy, are overwhelmed by the profusion of flora that they plant. This is how my art goes, it is cultivated in steps I’ve learned that are classic and practiced, but I never know where results will lead. It is like a planted garden that has gone wild in unexpected growth and plant species and the gardener is obscured by the wildness of the organic growth.  Art overwhelms me. The things I make don’t necessarily help to define me, in fact, by them I may be obscured.  I take paintings I made in the past that may have given an impression of who I am and I’ve ripped them apart. Though destroyed, bits of the old paintings still exist in the new paintings. My work grows from old plants that I’ve pruned and spliced into the new growth of the fresh canvas/soil and unexpected hybrids and even mutations occur. In the end I’ve probably overwatered some and many weren’t exposed to enough light, which means the result is a painting that came alive through it’s own adverse conditions and became something other than the gardener’s original intent. Sometimes weeds creep in.  I came to use the metaphorical plant images probably originally because I like organic forms as opposed to straight lined machined forms. “I am nature,” so Jackson Pollock is purported to have said. The nature in me attempts to come out through my action painting as well. My artworks seem to fall into three categories of gardens: seeds and sparks of life exploding with energy; gardens in full bloom; and wild almost jungle growth overtaking the gardener. 

Sun, earth, water and time make plants. Light, pigment, medium and time make art.

Like the building of life, my process for making a painting happen is Organic. Like life evolving, I feel myself in a near unthinking progress through time. One thing, one mark leads to another, each mark making the whole more complex yet still a whole. We all make choices of where we will make our next marks but none of us can completely predict where our life will lead. The action of making a mark leads to react/mark and the action continues and could continue forever. 

Art, like plants, is not permanent. Leaves whither and fall; leaves, fruit and flowers are picked and eaten; they provide pleasure with color, form and motion

Community garden community art

One of the ways i make my paintings as described on the left is to deconstruct my old paintings and use the elements i believe are still right for the paintings i am currently working on.  The above diptych, "Blue Horizons" ..."north"...and "south," was the first piece i did that led me to this current stream of work over the last three years and totally embodies that technique.  It was the piece that made me think perhaps i could make an artful impact on Manchester.