About gardening

Our garden is the width of the house, 5.5m, and about 16.5m long. That’s not very large but it’s big enough to keep me busy in season.
So gardening for me is not a major chore but an enjoyable and I would say therapeutic activity, both manual and creative.
As an Englishman I think I always aspired to having a garden of my own and it was an important criterion in looking for a house.
If truth be told, though, I hadn’t actually had a garden before moving here, but I took to it with great enthusiasm, discovering soon that I had green fingers.

The previous owners had clearly not been into gardening and I was faced with a veritable jungle on which I was free to place my own stamp. I regret very much never having taken photographs to show what it was like before I started.
My initial approach was to eliminate everything that I knew to be an undesirable weed and see what was left, in some cases waiting to be sure before deciding what to eradicate. Eradicate is the right word, some of those plants, in particular the nettles and something tall and yellow I’ve since seen growing alongside railway lines, had prodigious root systems. I discovered even the roots of nettles sting. Ivy had to go too as it is a menace to the walls and a generally depressing plant. Out came too a number of unwanted saplings that had seeded themselves over the years.

As I removed stuff, the underlying plan of the garden started to emerge and I have kept it.
Next to the house is a terrace, then there is a section with a large central oval flower bed and then a more open area with two trees at the very back - a large cherry and a tall holly. There was a third tree halfway down, a fir, basically a Christmas tree that had been planted out and grown into something towering above our three storey house, far too big for the garden, blocking out light and preventing anything from growing underneath it. That one had to be removed professionally. It’s never a comfortable decision to fell a tree, but the garden was immeasurably improved and the neighbours much relieved by its diappearance. I planted a rhodo and heather on top of the stump.
We had the disused staircase to the cellar filled in to widen the terrace and had the whole area re-tiled. It’s a great space for eating and sitting out.
We also had the paving around the central bed redone but kept its shape, mainly because it turned out to contain several serviceable rose-bushes which couldn’t be moved.
The open area seemed to have once been a vegetable garden with rows separated by paving tiles. I dug them all out and stacked them for future use, in particular to make a small terrace for a bench by the holly and a stepping stone path down the garden for when it’s wet. I turned the cleared open area into a lawn with the children in mind. It’s pretty small, it takes all of ten minutes to mow it, but it’s nice to have the open green space. At one stage we had it turfed but it has gradually reverted to the indifferent patchy condition it was in before.

The garden is surrounded by fairly high walls. We had the coping tiles replaced as some were ready to fall on the heads of playing children and the second winter I gradually repainted it all white, cementing some of the more crumbly bits as I went. Over the years I have pursued a policy of training plants up and along the walls to make up for lack of space on the ground, so not much of them is visible now and they won’t get repainted. Down one side there is an incredibly vigorous wisteria which also grows all the way up the rear façade of the house. It’s fabulous when in full purply blue flower, but it grows very fast and I have to make clear to it who”s boss. There are also several clematis, a vine that occasionally manages a few edible grapes and a well established passion flower.
The walls are also obscured by a series of tall shrubs/short trees. They are in order down the left, after the wisteria, a kerria japonica, an oak, a white rhododendron an apple and a forsythia, before reaching the cherry; and on the right an Oregon grape, a purple lilac (that sadly doesn’t flower much) and an immense rosemary (which flowers a lot) before the holly. Most of these started as small pot plants from the nursery and the kerria as cuttings from my parents’ garden.

Other cuttings from that source include the hydrangeas along the back wall and some white osteospernums which being resistant even to Yorkshire frosts have far outlived any I bought from a nursery.
As far as survivors from the starting garden go, they are mainly indigenous - lily of the valley, tall campanulas and foxgloves, forget-me-nots, wild strawberries and also yellow corydalis.
Also in the indegenous category are the bluebells which have spread considerably in the central bed from the few bulbs we originally dug out from the woods at Villers-la-Ville.
The mid-size inhabitants of the central bed have changed over the years. Sadly I’ve given up on dahlias as whatever I do the slugs seem to get them when just pushing up. There was a big lupin to begin with too but that died off and successors didn’t thrive. Instead I now have a bushy pink lavatera that I cut back to the ground every autumn, some tall dark irises and some lilies. There is a very old large fern right next to the terrace which has a fresh feel in the summer.

Although there are a few herbs by the rosemary and a meagre crop of apples, I mainly garden for flowers. I’ve worked at there always being something in bloom and put quite a lot of annuals in alongside the perennials.
First there are the bulbs (I put in over a hundred every year); these are staggered in themselves, between daffodils, hyacinths and various kinds of tulip. They are accompanied by the yellow forsythia and later kerria. In the first half of April the cherry is spectacular with white blossom. Then things really get going with the pink clematis montana, and the wisteria on the walls. Then the rhododendrons, peonies, irises and roses. Different clematis take over and the passion flower starts. Next are the hydrangeas, day lillies and agapanthus. On the ground in the main bed there are busy lizzies in the spring and summer and pansies in the autumn and winter, also a lot of alyssum late in the summer.
The terrace is surrounded by a number of window boxes, hanging baskets and pots full of small annuals which I put in in May for the whole season. In the winter I put violas in the window boxes so there is something colourful to look out on.

As I’ve been working on this small plot for eighteen years it’s what you would call a well established garden.
Gardens are artificial man-made places in which nature is a guest. Gardeners are by definition control freaks but it is best to work with nature rather than against it. I’m fairly indulgent and let things grow if they seem to like it where they are. My preferred approach is to thin out the luxuriant rather than to try to coax the sickly.
By the time we get to this season the foliage is very thick, but that’s nice and refreshing making the garden an oasis on a hot day like today. Leaves also absorb distant traffic noise. The garden is very popular with birds which is nice - to name some: tits, blackbirds, jays, magpies, pigeons, even parrots!
Then in the winter when everything has died back it’s quite bare with just the shapes of the trees, bushes and dead flower heads on the hydrangeas and agapanthus.
I like to watch the passing of the seasons and each one brings its different tasks to perform in the garden in an annual cycle: scarifying the lawn, pruning dead-wood, digging out the compost heap, putting in the bedding plants and annuals, thinning the new growth on the bushes and trees, mowing the lawn, raking up the dead leaves, planting the bulbs and so on.
But it all remains a hobby rather than a chore, a great excuse to get outside. The only downside is that sometimes I find it difficult just to sit still in the garden because I’ve noticed something that needs doing, a weed to be pulled out, a dead head to remove, a plant to be staked.
Finally though, especially at table on the terrace and on a long summer evening, I do sit still out there and look on fondly with some satisfaction at the results of my own gardening.

About painting

There seems to be a fundamental desire in man to record his life and surroundings in picture form, that is by the difficult task of reducing three dimensional reality to a two dimensional representation of it. The cavemen after all painted already and I myself like to draw and paint when I find the time and inclination. Painting is the highest expression of this desire and is one of the great achievements of Western culture. Painting is a tradition within which artists draw on those who came before them, either deriving from them or revolting against them, as they cater for and form the aesthetic of their age.

Painting has reached something of a crisis in modern art and these days for example the Turner prize is rarely given to a painter. Initially, striving to find a new purpose after the advent of photography, which could create pictures of reality mechanically, painters often veered away into abstraction. I think abstraction misses the point of painting which is to show how the artist sees the world or sees himself. When painting ceases to depict, it runs the risk of becoming merely decorative.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that all painting should be realistic or from life; many of the best paintings take various elements from reality and rearrange them into imagined patterns to make a point. Abstraction, on the other hand, from failing to engage with external reality becomes purely self-indulgent.

Another trap of abstraction is that increasing simplification of shape and colour lead it to a point where it requires no real painterly technique. The legitimate response it elicits from the viewer is "I could do better than that". I want to admire the painter's achievement, not be presented with something that is basically facile and poorly executed. There is no real technique in a Mondrian. Modern painting all too often has lost the delight in the physical technical skill of good brushwork.

In all of this there is an element of Emperor's new clothes. Out of intellectual snobbery too many of us are afraid to denounce a lot of modern painting for the vacuous work it is. Truly great art is of universal appeal. Everybody can find something in it on some level. You don't have to be initiated to get something out of it. Those who would have you believe that you don’t appreciate something because you are ignorant are merely promoting their own arrogance. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if you find a picture ugly or just plain boring, no amount of explaining will make you instantly like it. Have faith in your taste, over time it will evolve and you may one day come to enjoy Jackson Pollock - or then again, probably not.

When I was in my teens at grammar school I started to become interested in painting and its history and began poring over Thames and Hudson, Skira and other illustrated books in the school library. As I paint myself, my initial interest was to see what others had done and how.
It was only somewhat later that I started to have the opportunities to actually see some of these masterpieces “in the flesh” in the famous galleries of Europe (National Gallery London, Louvre, Prado, Rijksmuseum, Uffizi, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna - to name but a few). Seeing a painting full-size, in its actual colours and being able to inspect closely its brushwork brings a canvas to life to me even more than a live performance of music brings to life a piece I have on CD. Graphic reproduction is just not nearly as good as that of sound.
Inevitably I was drawn firstly to the impressionists in print and one of my first great gallery experiences was in the old Jeu de Paume in Paris when I was seventeen.

The impressionists are hugely popular now, although they didn’t go down so well with all of their contemporaries. I think it is easy to see why they appeal to so many people today. They depict what is recognizable everyday reality. Their subject matter is democratic, you don’t have to be well up on biblical stories, mythology or symbolist conventions to see what it’s about. What you see is what you get. What you see is also intended as an impression, a fleeting view - which also suits the modern sensibility. Their paintings are,as I say, recognizable, deliberately figurative; seeing what the subject is, you can feel “yes, they’ve brought that effect off well”. And yet it s obviously not photographic. Since they lived in the first great age of photography, it was important to the impressionists that their work should move away from a merely photgraphic representation. Perhaps too, at the time of black and white photography, that is also why colour was so important to them. So the untutored viewer at once recognizes the subject and the fact that it is “art” and is pleased by that. Many of their pictures are quite simply and undemandingly beautiful.
So I signed up wholesale for the extended family: Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Gaugin, Van Gogh. And they are still among my firm favourites.
The painters who immediately followed the impressionists (including already those at the end of my last list) are on the cusp of the modern and its final flight from figuration, recognizability and the desire to please anyone else apart from the artist himself (or maybe the critic and the dealer). So having developed a taste for impressionism, it was easy for me to explore forwards and of course backwards from them through art history.

Perhaps one should design major galleries accordingly. You could have a first room with all the popular impressionists and then the possibility of going backwards in time to the left and forwards to the right, until your interest peters out on repetitive clumsy anonymous altarpieces or large ugly pointless (and also clumsily executed) abstracts. Of course we are all free to organize our tours of galleries as we like and are all familiar with the phenomenon of fast forwarding through a series of unpromising rooms (often acres of Rubens or 18thC still lives of vases of flowers or dead animals). The key to any enjoyable gallery visit is after all, in my opinion, not to spend ten seconds on each single painting in the endless collection, but to spend plenty of time looking carefully at what catches your eye and interest and indeed to return to it again later in your visit (or on another visit). Incidentally, I think the great galleries should be free of charge to local residents so they can just pop in to see maybe the Bruegels for fifteen minutes.

Now is a great time to visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: since it is under major restoration they have taken the best works from just one period, the Dutch golden age, and hung them well in a reduced area so that the visitor’s attention is really focused. The great galleries of the world are impossible to take in on one visit - a fact that really struck me in the Metropolitan in New York. Concentrated shows are handy, but best of all is the freedom to return again and again.

So, without attempting a potted history of Western painting, who are the painters I linger in front of ? In writing this I’ve discovered there are many. Here are thirty of them.

Bosch:
Forget about Dali and Magritte, the greatest surrealist is here. Bosch’s imagination and fantastic creation are boundless. But he is also an extremely fine painter, the detail is delicate and spectacular and nowhere more so in the Garden of Delights tryptich.

Botticelli:
Spring/Primavera as an allegory of nascent fruitfulness is totally imaginary and an opportunity for capturing a number of elegant figures, mainly beautiful women, in a carefully balanced group composition. You don’t have to understand the symbols to enjoy the clarity and beauty of the forms and the sharpness of the detail.

Bruegel:
The detail in a Bruegel is encyclopaedic and a delight, beautifully and often humorously executed. And yet the overall design is always clear, without clutter and confusion. He is really a painter of man rooted in his social relations and environment; the subliminal message is everyday life is our lot. In the Fall of Icarus the over-ambitious Icarus is a mere splash in the sea while the foreground is held by the unperturbed toiling ploughman, contemplative shepherd and patient fisherman. My favourite is Hunters in the snow: the hunters and their dogs return empty-handed to the village while those outside the inn work at toasting grain. The main subject though is the glorious fantasy winter landscape of frozen lakes and distant peaks with countless small figures at work and play. The composition is really elegant with depth, pictures within pictures. The bright white of the snow, the sharp outline of the dark bare trees and the otherwise wan colours capture perfectly the atmosphere. You can feel the cold.

Caravaggio:
A fine way of passing a day in Rome is to go on a Caravaggio hunt from church to church. Caravaggio is of course famous for his dramatic chiaroscuro lighting effects. His characters are really alive, caught in a moment in a shaft of light against a dark background, their feet dirty and clothes stained. In the Supper at Emmaus they spring out of the canvas at you as the resurrected Christ reveals his identity. Caravaggio has a larger-than-life vivid intensity, which many have tried to imitate but rarely equalled.

Cézanne:
Cézanne has long been my favourite painter. I like what he paints but I mainly like how he paints. I like the chunky tangibility of his paint. I like the careful geometric composition and I adore his use of colour. Cézanne must have spent hours on a canvas and the effort invested communicates itself to the viewer. You can spend hours looking at a Cézanne. There is nothing slapdash about it. Every single stroke is carefully placed and the colours nuanced. It all adds up to an absorbing whole giving a satisfying sense of order and serenity. I particularly like the landscapes, especially those at l'Estaque. They are just right. The intensity of contemplation they convey is perhaps a key to a different awareness of being. Cézanne also achieves this in his still lives and portraits.

Dali:
Dali doesn’t just have an original crazy imagination, he can really paint well with a fine sophisticated finish. Some of his messages implicit in the titles really hit the mark (Civil war).

Degas:
Degas specializes in the unusual angle of view and framing of his compositions in which ordinary people feature giving them a snapshot of life feel which seems to imply some story of often hard everyday life (les Repasseuses, l’Absinthe).

Dürer:
Dürer is an incredibly fine draughtsman and some of his best work is in his drawings, though he left us a few fine sharp paintings. I’ve always been intrigued by the visionary clarity of his Self-portrait as Christ.

Freud, Lucian:
Some find Freud’s brutally realistic treatment of the human body of his rather normal sitters too much to take, but I welcome its honesty as it tells us far more about the reality of the human condition than the flattering diet usually served up to us.

Friedrich, Caspar David:
Friedrich’s romantic landscapes are idealized and present a powerful Nature that disdains insignificant man, who when he appears in his paintings is often seen from behind in contemplation of it. There is an eerie quality to his crystalline mountains that I find entrancing.

Goya:
Goya is of course several different painters. First he is the painter of the cartons for the tapestries, a fabulous series of beuatifully coloured and keenly observed everyday scenes in and around Madrid where all human life is present. I particularly like the optimistic young couple in Parasol and the Marriage procession. Then he is the court painter of royal portraits whose objective sincerity is yet beautiful and therefore gets away with showing his patrons warts and all (Family of Carlos IV). Finally he is the witness of attrocities and the dark side of man whose pessimistic black period works counterbalance the joy of his first period (3rd May 1808, Romeria de San Isidro). Throughout his career his gift is his penetrating observation of the human face and behaviour and his ability to hint at the rest with free brushwork.

El Greco:
It’s sometimes hard to remember that El Greco was painting in the 16thC: his elongated, distorted body shapes, strange backgrounds and unorthodox colour schemes are really modern. Some of his paintings seem like halucinatory expressionism as in the top half of the Burial of Count Orgaz in Toledo

Kirchner:
Kirchner is one of my favourite moderns; He is basically a fauve with a penchant for primitive art and brings that technique to bear on city life in Berlin, female nudes and the tranquil Swiss Alps with surprising results.

Klimt:
Initially drawn to Klimt as a teenager by his subdued eroticism, I contnue to enjoy his very personal decadent style. His lesser known landscapes are very fine too.

Manet:

Not really a full-on impressionist at all, Manet is simply one of the best unsentimental painters of ordinary people. I really like the Barmaid at the Folies Bergères, looking rather bored behind the fabulously painted bar and with the room packed with customers reflected in the mirror behind her.

Michelangelo:
The problem of including Michelangelo here is that virtually his entire painterly output is in the frescoes on the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I was knocked out by the beautiful colours and clear lines when I saw it again in 1995 after the accumulated grime of Papal concaves had been removed. You can see the sculptor in Michelangelo at work, though flat the figures have an almost three-dimensional presence.

Monet:
It was Monet’s picture Impression that gave the name to the movement and in many ways he is the king and most prolific of the impressionists. Since the light of the fleeting moment was everything to him, he often reworked the same subject as in the series of Rouen Cathedral. There are so many good Monets you keep on discovering new ones. It is of course in landscapes where he excels, especially with the presence of water which allows him to fully exploit the effects of reflected light (Regatta).

Picasso:
Picasso was extremely prolific and went through various periods: his is an unbridled energy of creation, an almost physical need to throw off works. I don’t by any means like all of his ouput, but there is something in the boldness of his simple lines and his fertile imagination that commands admiration. I have a great liking for his earlier blue and pink periods ( Self-portrait Family of saltimbanques) before he started to break really new ground, I just find the brushwork less rushed and more satisfying and the images more beautiful. His great achievement though is doubtless his monumental Guernica actually one of his few paintings to have a message, rather than being just an exercise in seeing things differently.

Raffaello:
Raphael’s pictures have the clarity, simplicity and purity that many overdone cluttered works by other Italian renaissance painters lack. The composition and colours of Virgin in the meadow are exquisite: it is a picture of perfect balance.

Rembrandt:
Although his range in colour and subject are a bit limited for my taste, I have to admit to being captivated by Rembrandt’s skill as a portraitist and his often free and innovatory way of painting.

Renoir:
Though I’ve never really liked his nudes and children, I do like Renoir’s group and crowd scenes (Moulin de la Galette). He has a broad range and a light touch.

Riviera, Diego:
To avoid being accused of pure Euro-centrism I include Riviera for his grandly conceived and winningly executed murals in Mexico City.

Schiele:
The expressionist Schiele’s angular scrawny figures have a slightly disturbing quality that conveys a modern existenial angst in a way that I find gripping and fascinating.

Tiziano:
Titian is a fantastic portraitist and an untiring enthusiast of the joys of paint. He can also place a ravishing nude to good effect in a composition, as in the Venus of Urbino. Here the gorgeously painted knowingly sensuous reclining nude woman takes up the whole foreground. In one half of the background are two other female figures: a little girl with her head in a box (innocence) watched over by a matron. I see an allegory of three ages of womanhood.

Turner:
Turner’s totally free and impressionistic way with paint to create stunning light effects is revolutionary (the Fighting Téméraire).

Van der Weyden:
One of my favourite paintings in the Prado is Van der Weyden’s Descent from the cross. The large figures in their bright blues, reds and greens stand out against a plain background in a tight geometric pattern, the body of the swooning Mary parallels the limp Christ being lowered from the cross. The grief on the fantastically life-like faces is palpable. It is a deeply moving painting.

Van Eyck:
Van Eyck is here for two brilliant masterpieces: the huge religious work called for its central panel the Adoration of the lamb in Ghent; and the secular portrait of the Arnolfini couple. Both works are charcterized by perfectly balanced composition, stunning colour, miniscule detail and lifelike faces. The finish is immaculate throughout the whole painted surface.

Van Gogh:
Van Gogh has one of the most instantly recognizable personal styles of any painter. The texture of the paint is everything: contorted, swirling, writhing, restlessly worked over. The colours are liberating. The designs charmingly naive. The images are direct and cogent. People thought he painted like a madman. He was one. His disturbed, uneasy vision is very 20thC already and yet often curiously optimistic in a way that places him in a brighter past.

Velazquez:
Just how good a painter Velazquez is you can see in the Topers/Bacchus where the group composition is skilfully managed, the facial expressions are fantastic and some of the detail such as the wine in the cup exquisitely brought off. His masterpiece is perhaps las Meninas a huge cleverly composed and enigmatic picture of life in the Spanish court, more particularly in the artist’s studio. The viewer is in the position of the sitters whom the artist is seen painting from behind his canvas and are in turn caught in the mirror on the back wall. The children, the main subject, are caught as though not posing, the girl being consoled by the maid, the boy teasing the dog. But who is the grotesque midget and the man in the doorway at the back?

Vermeer:
There are only about forty pictures by Vermeer extant. You can see he must have put a lot of time into producing one. The paint is beautiful: the choice of colours, the play of the light, the surface pearly, smooth, translucent. His favourite subject is a woman caught unawares going about an everyday task, reading, pouring milk, lit by daylight falling into a room. The effect is spontaneously natural, but that is a fiction as the entire composition is carefully and geometrically planned and the objects, all beautifully observed, chosen for their symbolic value to suggest a story.

Vermeer brings me full circle to the picture at the top of this piece. We see him (the self-portrayed artist) working in his studio painting his model. He takes his inspiration from her beauty as a woman, from the ravishing colour of her dress and from the other arts, music and literature (she holds an instrument and a book). He reflects this carefully in paint on his canvas, producing a work of beauty in form and colour that at the same time makes a statement as to how he views the world, its surface and what is behind it, and of course how he views himself. This is a true painter at work.