I’ve spent the past two weeks reading and thinking about the garden as a concept, while painting, making Christmas cards, running, not sleeping etc., Fundamentally ‘the garden’ elevated to an exemplar confounds any understanding of the garden in particular. I think I’m edging towards a view that the garden you experience is largely, or at least to some degree, the garden you carry with you. That garden is a concept that grows into the physical suroundings you occupy at a particular time. This means that your personal response, layered with who your are in all your aspects, is plastered over a space continually. Spaces you see less often are able to dominate your experiences, asserting themselves and their histories and epiphanies, except for those moments of deja vu where ‘you’ poke through the reverie. Spaces that you live in, and these can be spaces that you visit regularly, become ‘you’ and exemplify your particular reverie. So , while you can describe a garden physically and illustrate it in great detail, you can never explain it to anyone because, even in itself, their occupation of it is precisely theirs.

This highlights the necessity of non-linear narrative in the gardens of the project, a timelessness in the way routes are mapped through the spaces, and the infiltration of external influences (albeit at a distance) into the spaces as they are experienced.

The first space, Glover Street 1966, will have the back yard and back alley with the daddylonglegs and the railings. Through the railings you will enter the park, as I remember it, a sea of gravel with a small area of play equipment at one edge. A slide, a roundabout and a seesaw. The major feature of the space will be an inflatable toy, one of those where you weight the bottom with sand so that it won’t fall over. I distinctly remember being in the park with my brothers and being approached by a little girl who didn’t speak English, carrying this toy that was as big as her, she presented it to us and left. Triggering the toy will, somehow, trigger the story.

Glover Street 1960 ‘backs’

The current layout, to Sunday 13^th December, looks like this. The trees have too many polygons, these are rowan, hornbeam and holly bushes from cadnav under their free use license but I’ll need to change them to a workaround as there are already 4.5 million faces in the model. The idea is to limit the ‘world’ to as little as there needs to be to tell the story and allow for progression.

Glover Street Layout 13 12 20

I made some Christmas cards this week so that Glenda could pick one to send to a friend,

Christmas Card Collection

She picked one of the landscape Christmas trees,

Winter wooods cards

And I’m continuing my experiment in learning to paint.

I’ve made these paintings of cellophane wrapped candles.

cellophane wrapped candles

cellophane wrapped candles two

I’ve also been working on some portraits, attempted copies of a lebrun painting in oils on board working directly, no drawing, just painting directly, that are less successful but still in progress.

bather (one) in progress

bather (two) in progress

I’ve also continued the daily drawings, December’s gallery.