Lilacs, oil on stretched linen canvas, (45.5x40.5cm)

Haidee-Jo Summers shows that there's a subject to be found in every garden as she demonstrates an oil painting of a table of pots and plants beside a potting shed.

Gardens as inspiration

Claude Monet, the artist most famous for being a passionate horticulturist, dedicated 43 years of his life to developing and painting his beautiful garden at Giverny. Many of his most iconic works were completed there, such as The Japanese Footbridge and Water Lily series, which consists of around 250 paintings.

My garden certainly isn’t on the grand scale of Giverny, and my gardening skills are almost non-existent, but I think there’s a subject to be found in even the most humble backyard.

Painting at home has many obvious advantages, you needn’t worry about forgetting any supplies and refreshments are readily available.

Another great reason to choose your own garden as a subject is being able to study the same view in different lighting conditions and throughout all the seasons.

I have painted a small series of the yew tree in my front garden at different times of the day for my own practice and development (see below).

Yew Tree, Morning Light, oil, (20.5x25.5cm)

Yew Tree, Afternoon Light, oil, (20.5x25.5cm)

Yew Tree, March Drizzle, oil, (20.5x25.5cm)

Light and movement

Washing Line and Apple Blossom, oil, (15x30.5cm)

Before you decide on a viewpoint and composition you need to start looking at your garden through your artist’s eyes, observing areas that have an interesting abstract arrangement of shapes and colours. A simple viewfinder can help you to see a potential composition for a painting, but make sure that the shape of the aperture you are looking through has the same proportions as your painting surface. Then you can use the viewfinder frame to note where objects in your composition will reach the edges of your panel or canvas.

One of my favourite garden subjects is clothes on a washing line. I’m excited by the patterns of light, particularly on white garments, the unexpected shapes and movement and, also I must acknowledge, a sentimental attachment to this motif.

Other garden subjects that I am particularly drawn to are vegetables growing in raised beds or containers, and the play of light through a greenhouse or reflections of the sky in glass or water. Even on a dull overcast day there is light to be found if you have a pond or greenhouse.

Greenhouse and Sheets, oil, (30.5x40.5cm)

Shadows

Nasturtiums at Rosemary’s, oil, (30.5x40.5cm)

If you are a flower painter I very much recommend getting outside and painting flowers as they are growing, not least because they may last rather longer than they will in a vase (weather permitting) but also because the deep shadows in a mass of foliage do a terrific job of showcasing the blooms, as in my painting of nasturtiums (above).

Pets

Tea in the Garden, May, oil, (25.5x30.5cm)

I try to include my pets when I can, or those belonging to owners of the garden that I’m painting.

Cats and hens are my favourites to capture. The painting Tea in the Garden, May (above) shows my cat Pumpkin asleep on a chair in the garden. We recently lost Pumpkin at a grand old age and are so happy to still have this special painting.

Charlie and White Daffodils, oil, (25.5x20.5cm)

Demonstration: Beside the Potting Shed, Gunby Hall

Beside the Potting Shed, Gunby Hall, stretched cotton canvas, (28x35.5cm)

I prefer to look for an intimate little corner rather than a grand sweeping vista, and as I am seeking a challenging arrangement of shapes I am often drawn to areas of clutter, which exists beside a shed or greenhouse.

Gunby Hall in Lincolnshire provided me with this complicated scene to get my teeth into. My aim was to simplify the chaotic subject and capture a joyful and timeless scene, one that is familiar to all gardeners.

One of the loveliest aspects of this subject for me was the textural contrast between the more regimented solid shapes of the pots, table and building features and the more fluid, delicate shapes of the foliage.

 

You will need:

• Raw umber, raw sienna, ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson

Step 1

I used a stretched cotton canvas that I had previously tinted with a light-mid grey colour.

I started with a raw umber and raw sienna mix thinned down with a little low odour solvent to plot the position of the windows and the potting table, and mark roughly where the bottom of the plant pots would be.

Step 2

Wanting to get away from this linear drawing stage quickly, I picked up a large very soft filbert brush and blocked in all the mid-dark values using a mix of paint colours leftover from my last painting.

This simplified the subject right down to its bare bones – a light/dark pattern – and I could already see that I had an effective design with shapes that pleased me.

Top tip I find that mixing up left-over paint on the palette at the end of a session makes a useful grey/brown, which can be used in the next painting, and I hate to waste expensive paints. I store it in a mini jam jar or a metal dipper with a lid until it’s needed.

Step 3

I added various amounts of ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson and raw sienna to my left-over paint mix, which gave me different colour tints while keeping to the mid-dark values.

I quickly worked some colour differentiation into those darker areas, making the mix cooler for the black plant pots and warmer for the terracotta ones.

 

Step 4

Next, with a clean brush and a clean area of the palette, I mixed colours for the lighter tonal values, a terracotta for the sunlit brick wall and greens for the plants, while were painted loosely to suggest the direction of growth.

Step 5

Starting to introduce a little detail, I mixed a warm white for the sunlit window frames and placed it on top of the darker values using a synthetic angular brush with a neat, crisp edge.

When I’d finished the bright white parts of the window, I added some ultramarine, crimson and raw sienna to the warm white to get to a shadow version of the window frame colour. I was being careful to retain character in the window frames by making lots of shorter marks that don’t quite match up, rather than sweeping, long straight lines.

While I was working with whites I also dropped in the labels in the plant pots. Although seemingly a small detail, these plant markers are so familiar to us that they provide an important clue to the narrative of the painting.

Top tip The key to keeping your lights clean and bright when going over an area of wet paint is to load up your brush again with the clean paint on the palette after each stroke, and to apply plenty of colour.

Use a light touch here – you don’t want to dig in to those dark, still wet colours.

Consistency is also important: the paint I applied here was just a little more fluid than tube consistency; I use small amounts of walnut oil to loosen the paint where required.

Step 6

Beside the Potting Shed, Gunby Hall, stretched cotton canvas, (28x35.5cm)

Finally, I added a few smaller marks to represent leaves and flowers, and strengthen the effect of the pots with highlights, and dark shadows here and there.

A few abstract dark shapes and curved lines broke up the space underneath the potting table and suggested clutter there without particularly drawing the eye.

I declared it finished at this point as I didn’t want to go on so far as to lose its joyful energy, and I did think it was time for a cup of tea in the sunshine!

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Haidee-Jo Summers is a full-time professional artist known for painting gardens, landscapes and seascapes 'en plein air'. Vice President of the Royal Institute of Oil painters (VPROI) and an elected member of the Royal Society of Marine Artists (RSMA) her work can be seen each year at the Mall Galleries in London in these prestigious society exhibitions. See more from Haidee-Jo on her website, www.haideejo.com.