Navigating Monet's Water Garden

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tl4ghv004t2hs6p/navigating%20monets%20water%20garden%20.mp4?dl=0

This series began as drawings originally made at Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris 2014,  in direct response to the lived encounter and immersion in both the Claude Monet water garden at Giverny and the Nymphéas installation at Musee de l’ Orangerie, Paris. The focus was on the lived experience of encounter; the impact of such a compressed surface and space; both at the Giverny pond and the large panels, particularly Reflection with Willows, second room, west wall at Musee de l’ Orangerie. They involved psychological  encounter, providing a link to memory and childhood as much as a link to the body being immersed in an entangled space.

I became interested in de-tangling this space, opening up the surface. The work has been made as on site studies, studio drawings in Paris and on site drypoints at Giverny, later printed at the graphic studio in Paris. On return to Australia the drawings were used to extend into large format paintings on canvas followed again by more drawings.

The paintings, primarily as drawing in oilstick, became an extension of the memory of the de tangling experience of the embedded surfaces of the painting and sensory experiences of compression within the garden; as a site of bodily immersion. The works are about drawing and painting , records of acts of making, imparting their own independent experiences. They become remnants, traces of experiences, releasing the line and mark into their own identities, rather than the direct representations of a water garden.