Gardens and Painting

There have been a lot of good art programmes on Sky Arts and BBC4 lately. So I'd thought I'd report on at least one of them. Sky Arts “Painting the modern garden Monet to Matisse” accompanied an exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, which doesn't seem to be on anymore.. The programme starts by pointing out that while painting gardens has been looked down upon in recent times in the early 20th Century by many artists used them for inspiration. The most obvious of these was Monet. In his garden he set different colour plants against one another and was looking for new colours in the garden, so it was always changing. He often put flowers with opposing colours together, the opposite of what was considered good in an english garden. Monet was influenced by scientific exploration as new plants were brought to the west from all over the world and transported to gardens. This is where Monets pink water lillies came from, previously they would have been white. There were many contributors to the programme such as the artist Lachlan Gaudi, and art from other painters including, James Tissot’s Chrysanthemums. I have to admit that while the complimentary colours are eye-catching I have always felt most comfortable with in the natural English landscape with it more subdued colours and I love the white garden at the National Trusts Hidcote although my own garden is more random.