Painting in the garden at the Lingholm Estate Portinscale

This is the initial water colour sketch in my garden sketch book. Its where I tried to plan out the this painting of Lingholms walled Garden. There where plenty of onlookers and visitors to the garden and kitchen and  needed to see if this view would actually work. In the studio and sometimes outdoors, largely dependant on the conditions its interesting to go with the flow and if necessary scrape off and over paint and correct areas of work or simply change my mind and pick out a different focus that may emerge for the work. After all  the more you look at something the more you see, changes in light wind etc etc can also make a sound reason for altering a composition . More often than not unless Im work small scale I get a bit caught out sometimes so if when you first pick up your brush and you like the look of the shadows do record them. 

The issue with painting in the  walled garden are the shadows and a back drop of dark trees which soar skywards. The layout is also quite formal leaving little room for creative exploration. When painting nature I try and stick with or whats the point I may as well sit at home and think  garden.

This is the first blocking out process the pots and urns add a definite structure and warm points of interest, the tall peas on their canes also make a wonderful backdrop. The light glancing over the garden walls created wonderful patterns through the leaves. I kept my brush marks small to try and emulate this pattern.

This is the second stage and the final one en plein air before I complete this and a couple of other smaller works. I had spent a couple of hours last week looking through some excellent books I bought on Whistler, Sorolla and Cezanne's garden paintings and had a kind of painterly journey in my mind. So  I annoyed myself considerably when I realized towards the final few minutes that I  had moved away from this accidently. The same thing happened at Gawthorpe Hall I'll try and post some of Sorolla's and Whistlers images. So you can see what I'm getting at.