Secret Garden, London.

This is my first submission to the Calypso Moon Artist Movement. Our challenge was to paint our Secret Garden. I live in a very green area of London, alongside beautiful vistas of trees and grassland just a stone’s throw from the Thames River, but, for me, none of it could be classified as ‘secret’. My ‘Secret Gardens’ are the great parks of London, and they are truly ‘Great’. I have my own special corners in these elegant spaces where Londoners come to relax and absorb the beauty and because one can be so anonymous in these masterpieces, a sense of owning a personal spot becomes very real. My secret garden is really ‘secret’ so I am not telling where it is. It is a wonderfully serene corner and I have the feeling that it has been there for a very long time; nothing new, nothing cultivated; just a naturally occurring place of peace. Strangely the vista I have chosen to paint is interesting for its lack of flowers; it’s just a cacophony of greens, layered one on the other with alarming subtlety and complexity.

Depicting the myriad variations of green was something I found tough, but I had set myself the challenge of pulling off this monochromatic scene. Possibly the end result might have been more convincing in oils as I would be able to blend the colours with a bit more subtlety, but I decided to stick with my own personal challenge of learning about 'water colour and gouache' as a medium all over again, and I am finding some marvellous surprises along the way. This work took me six hours.

"Secret Garden, London"
Water Colour & Gouache on Paper - 11.5" x 11.5" (Approx.)