The Green Room// How the Garden Seekers Project began

Formal gardens have captured the imaginations of artists for centuries; from the detailed 1st century AD frescoes on the fated villa walls in Pompeii, to Ivor Abraham’s 1970 Privacy Plots print series which explores the influence of Victorian garden formality on British suburban gardens.

Although they were made nearly two thousand years apart, both examples reflect our desire to manipulate nature and create a green enclosure, a man made boundary between the private domain and the outside world.

 The medieval hortus conclusus (garden enclosed) was originally developed in monasterial cloistered gardens as a space for prayer and meditation. These green rooms were later adopted by Renaissance garden designers and modified to create divisions and structures, which formed specific spaces to discover and move through in a private property.

 My own long-term fascination with formal gardens inspired The Green Room, a series of paintings and drawings which investigates the geometry and ambiguity of formal garden design and how it feels to view and interact with them.

I began the research process by examining garden design on a wider level. Visits to the majestic Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain offered an introduction to the Islamic approach to formal design and rococo ideas came from the Palace of Sanssouci in Potsdam in Germany. On my travels across Britain, the most memorable experiences included navigating the maze at Somerleyton Hall in Norfolk and sketching the extraordinary, swollen topiary forms at Levens Hall, Cumbria. I had the good fortune to be admitted into the gardens at dusk and for a short precious time, imagined those wondrous gardens were there for me alone.

It has however, been the experience of the Italian Villas in Tuscany and Villa D’Este near Rome which have been the most influential. They have offered a glimpse of the ‘garden magic’ that Edith Wharton proposed in her celebrated book Italian villas and their gardens. Writing about the Villa D’Este in Tivoli, she described how:

 “ The grounds are not large, but the impression produced is full of a tragic grandeur. The villa towers above so high and bare, the descent from terrace to terrace is so long and steep, there are such depths of mystery in the infinite green distances and in the cypress-shaded pools of the lower garden, that one has a sense of awe rather than of pleasure in descending from one level to another of darkly rustling green.”  (1904, p 144)

I quickly became interested in the harmony and proportion of the Italian Renaissance garden, and keen to provoke some of the ‘mystery and awe’ that Wharton wrote about. I could certainly feel it as I sat quietly sketching under the searing Tuscan sun. Renaissance gardens reflect the Italian architect Leon Batista Alberti’s proposal that the garden should be designed as an integral part of the home. A space to live, work and play. Parallels can be made with our need to section, divide and contain the spaces where we live both indoors and out. I can distinctly remember as a child, exploring the vast gardens at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and how strangely secure and incredibly familiar they seemed to be.

The carefully designed and structured garden rooms began to echo the safe and comfortable spaces in the home, all interlinked but having separate identity and purpose. None of the Green Room paintings however depict a real space. They are all fictitious spaces that exist as an illusion. These spaces attempt to lead the viewer to believe that they are in a labyrinth. Some offer an outsider’s viewpoint; others can evoke a sense of being lost or cornered. Michael Archer wrote about this in his text which accompanied the exhibition:

 “In these pictures the hedges supply a stage of deeply satisfying pictorial forms and structures. At first they appear decorative and enticing, suggesting that one could walk between them but the more one looks the more one can see that many are impossible and act as barriers rather than inviting exploration. Elaborate formal gardens with high hedges have always seemed mysterious to me, invoking overheard conversations clandestine meetings and the tantalising image of a figure scene fleetingly at the end of an allée which when sought appears to have disappeared into thin air.”

The hedge shapes in the paintings are useful compositional devices which can be viewed as three-dimensional natural forms or abstracted textural shapes. This idea evolved from a deep interest in early Renaissance painting. I am intrigued by the relationship between the rather flattened architectural spaces and forms and the highly modelled figures common to artists working in the late 15th century such as Domenico Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli. A little later in the early 16th century Lorenzo Lotto deployed green cloth drapes in his paintings as a spatial, compositional device to dramatic effect. The dark drapery emphasises the figures placed in front of it whilst concealing the image beyond.

By placing children in and around the dense clipped green forms in the paintings, my aim was to explore the garden as a metaphor for the complex human journey into adolescence. Inviting the viewer to navigate unknown territories where the route is visible but unclear. Archer goes on to say:

“The children in these pictures are just visiting. The garden with its hedges does not belong to them; they have come for the day bringing a football and a picnic. They have alluded the adults but have not escaped each other. Although some are looking at others, their glances are not returned. The boys laughing uproariously are laughing separately not together. The idea of running round a maze or walking in a bright topiary garden suggests carefree happiness but the reality often involves indifference, introspection, exclusion or the minor cruelties which the young deliberately or inadvertently inflict on one another. All these feelings are here and they are emphasised by the hedges, which separate the figures or bring them together while also providing the dislocations of plane and perspective which keep us guessing.”

Ultimately, there are so many similarities between the language of garden design and the language of painting. Colour, shadow, texture, form and compositional explorations continue to underpin my work and attempt to fuse the two. It has been very interesting for me to revisit early work that formed the seed of today’s Garden Seekers Project. Twenty years later, the pandemic has affirmed the positive effect that gardens can have on the individual and the community. We need gardens and green spaces now more than ever. Our relationship with gardens continues to evolve and so will, I hope, the audience relationship with the Green Room paintings.

Jane Frederick May 2021

The Green Room was first exhibited at Firstsite Minories Art Gallery Colchester Essex June 19-July 24 1999

Michael Archer is a retired senior research curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum

You can explore the work of Ivor Abrahams on https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ivor-abrahams-622

All Green Room photos © Jane Frederick