Another Secret Garden

I have the privilege of visiting a very secret garden on a daily basis this week. It is the perfect cross between an ancient Japanese garden and a sub tropical Cornish garden. The weather is suddenly very hot and the light and shade astonishing.

All this charmed me in to taking out a drawing board and charcoal. I rarely draw any more and I asked myself why. Sitting on a bench in the lush garden with three attentive cats and the perfect voice of the blackbird, I began the old familiar routine.

Forgot I had Parkinson's again. When I paint my left hand does not tremor at all. When I draw it has it's little drawing dance of it's own. I am blessed to be right handed and after the adjustment of realising again that my body is different now, I got in to the swing of two hands doing different things at the same time (Maybe I should take up drumming.)

I used to demonstrate drawing while teaching in a university. I couldn't do it now; everyone would be hypnotized by the wayward left hand. I am.

I am going back to the blissful garden now, where there is no-one to watch me draw except the ever vigilant cats.

A Sunny Corner

I always knew that one day I would paint this sunny corner.

My parent's love to visit National Trust garden's and there are many of them in Cornwall. They, and my grandparents, instilled the magic of flower gardens in me from birth. My Mother's parents had a huge Victorian house with a walled garden that she and I both grew up in. There are pictures of us at the same age on the blissful sunny lawn.

One of my favorite books as a child was "the Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett. My Grandfather spoke with the gentle northern Thee and Thous and was always in his wellies digging. I believed he was the gardener in the book. I used to like to work alongside him, his usual silent industry broken by a whistled tune. He called me "sweet pea".

So the painting of the pot in the sunny, walled garden is a memory holder of childhood, innocence, safety, and of the joy and peace only a garden can bring.

Incurable Optimist.

My "Mermaid's Garden" paintings began as a fantasy of a sanctuary under the ocean; a calm place with the seaweeds waving in the ocean breeze; tiny fish ebbing and flowing; jewels of the sea bed.

I imagined myself laying Ophelia like amongst the shells, looking up to the sun speckled ceiling; my long hair winding about me in the water; a flicker of my jade fins langoriously levering me over the coral.

It's my sanctuary, a land where there are no wars and no diseases; peace.

I'm incurably optimistic, I have to be.


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