I didn’t make it to the Garden this week but went to the studio instead to carry on with my mono print experiments. Experiments partly because I have never actually systematically focused on printmaking and what learning I have done has been through one-off workshops.
I continue to think about the significance of gardens and ask myself what it is that seems to have ticked all my boxes about this project. Some of the answer lies in this paragraph from a review in the Guardian on the show at the Royal Academy: Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, that I came across the other day:
Monet died in 1926. The 20th century had even worse horrors to come than the slaughter that made his willows weep and it’s in that shadow that his painted gardens matter. They are glowing islands of civilisation and hope in a modern world guilty of so much barbarity and violence. Monet is not just one of the world’s greatest artists, he is one of the most moral.
