As with so many of my paintings, this little beauty started life at a workshop I attended with the intention of developing new skills. The workshop was focusing on how to handle heavy bodied acrylics which I had explored but wanted to hear how the experts worked. Sylvia Paul was leading the two day event and was very inspiring. We were to choose our own stimulus of a garden but, not being a gardener, I did not have an abundance of reference images. The night before the workshop, desperate for inspiration, I grabbed a book my partner had on his bookshelf ‘The practical rock and water garden’ by Peter Robinson and flipped through the pages. I stopped mesmerised by a picture with the caption “as darkness descends, the strong outline of the iris leaves will be clearly emphasised by the spotlight” I’d found my image. I snapped the picture on my phone. The next day Sylvia commented that she didn’t know how I was managing to create the painting glancing now and then at my iphone. I thought I was making a good stab at it, but it was far too complicated a subject matter for me to complete in the day, and to be fair, the source image was very small! I left the painting for a few weeks and eventually went into the studio to make some sense of it all, remembering the techniques I’d learned at the workshop. This is a fair representation of the photograph but it has enough unspoken about it deliberately left for the viewer to finish for themselves. A powerful piece at 60cm x 40cm.

Secret Garden
Secret Garden
- Post author:Duffy Tomei
- Post published:November 9, 2022
- Post category:Uncategorized
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