The hole in the hedge

If you’d asked me what I’d end up painting from my visit to the Butchart Gardens last November, I don’t think either of us would’ve guessed “a hole in a hedge”.

I loved this view when I found it and knew I wanted to paint it, but it was only recently that I was finally ready to.

In June’s Painted Post letter, I wrote about something I’d read in Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. He talks about the stage before a project begins, when it exists mostly in your imagination and all the possibilities are still open. Before it becomes a real thing with limitations and compromises and wrong turns, it can still be anything.

Burkeman’s point is that eventually you have to leave that stage behind and start making the thing, and he’s right, of course. But reading it made me realise that I don’t experience that stage as a delay. I genuinely enjoy it.

I revisited this photo many times over the following months. I pinned it to inspiration boards and thought about how I might paint it. I knew I wanted the hedge to frame the view, but it took time to work out exactly how. I loved this moment from my trip to Canada and wanted to capture the delight of coming across this hidden little view.

During that dreaming stage, it existed as a large painting you could get lost in, a small study and plenty of versions in between. Before a painting becomes one thing, it gets to be many things.

Eventually I decided on its fate, and by then I knew what I wanted it to be. I mixed the colours and made the first marks. Some of the things I’d imagined worked, while others changed once there was paint in front of me.

I don’t think the eight months before that were time spent failing to get around to it. I liked having this slightly odd view from the Butchart Gardens sitting around in my head for a while.

There are still plenty of photos from that trip waiting on my computer. I’m in no particular hurry to decide what all of them will become.

The Painted Post is where a lot of these thoughts about making things end up. Each month I send subscribers an art print and a letter from my studio.