Art-Making and Garden Life

This week, I talk about how gardening inspires both my husband and me. The garden is present in these two new miniature paintings as well.

It is already autumn in Finland, but we have summer in our hearts because we have done a lot of work in the garden during the summer. My husband has put all his energy there, I don’t have quite as big a passion. The garden is his canvas, but for me, painting is the most important.

Freely Grown – and a New Sweet Spot

I have a new course in the making called Freely Grown, which I hope to run in late October and get for pre-sale next week. There we will paint layered flowers in watercolor and finish the painting with colored pencils.

Lately, I’ve found my sweet spot in the way I look at plants. I can see both playfulness and soulfulness in them. This perspective has brought new positivity to my life. I think that art always has a lot of possibilities. Making art is like walking down a long corridor full of doors. Now I have found a door where I can be funny and profound at the same time. This insight also affects the creation of the course. I’ve had a lot of fun, although I haven’t compromised on explaining the details.

Making a Dream Come True

The garden is my husband’s canvas. He’s been making a bigger water feature all summer. It’s big enough to be called a pond. I wasn’t terribly excited about it, but the further the project has progressed, the more I understand his vision.

One of the hardest things both in art-making and garden life is visioning – so, dreaming! The dream must be simplified so that it can be remembered during the making. All projects have ugly phases. The dream must still be maintained.

Even these miniature paintings, for which I use leftover paints from the palette, looked pretty terrible at first.

However, I had a dream and knew these would become really nice.

I also made small paintings like this earlier this year, remember?

See this blog post for more pics!

Planning a Garden

In the spring, we hired a professional garden planner to draw a plan for a part of our backyard.

It was a bit like taking a course. We got points of view from a professional and she helped us to see further in our dreams. With that, I learned a lot about plants and how to plan a garden like dividing a house into rooms. It is not very far from a painting.

Think about a painting as a place that has its own identity. My small paintings are like tiny closets but bigger ones often like halls.

See more pics about this big painting in this blog post!

Art-Making and Garden – Back to the Pond

The pond is entirely my husband’s work – although he has probably watched all the pond-building videos on YouTube!

I feel that the pond already affects my paintings. Do you remember this watercolor painting I presented a couple of weeks ago?

See this blog post for more pics!

I think I already have a little love for that pond, its plants, its reflections, and how it reminds me of Monet’s garden.

However, winter is already coming. Art-making and garden life will be a bit more separate then. But the flowers will bloom on the canvas. And my husband will start watching YouTube again to see what he could create next summer.

Can you relate? Do you have a garden?