THE GARDEN

THE GARDEN is a show of paintings, prints and sculpture by artists who are also keen gardeners.

The show represents North House Gallery's contribution to Manningtree's Earth Festival (11 June), the first iteration of which last year highlighted climate and environmental concerns and proposed solutions to a large number of people in different zones throughout the town.

LILLIAS AUGUST showed her long still life watercolour of root vegetables two years ago in the 30x30 exhibition. She was one of few people to seriously take up the challenge of buying only local food from a 30 mile radius for 30 days. She has gone on to paint, in her immaculate style, more vegetables and some tulips.

SIMON CARTER is an assiduous gardener as well as a respected painter of his local landscape. His garden paintings in acrylic on canvas are in a similar layered style to his landscapes, the new works focussed on his garden in Autumn and Winter and an earlier piece in lush green, Mrs Chatto's Ponds.

GLEN FARRELLY, sculptor, now lives and works in Wales but in 2015 narrowly escaped a forest fire in California. Formerly a ceramicist, he was inspired by the beauty of the blackened trees to change his artistic direction. He has continued to make his garden sculptures from discarded or abandoned wood, burning them black in the Japanese Yakisugi method to protect them from decay.

FERGUS HARE, who has had two solo shows at North House Gallery and shown in each Summer show since 2019, has contributed a single work, a mysterious painting of mysterious women hanging washing in a mysterious garden. It is for the viewer to create the story.

MELVYN KING has been inspired by his own 'Garden of Curiosities' in Harwich. 'The house was called Briarwood – we found the briars but where was the wood? Over thirty years ago we planted 100 bare-rooted trees and shrubs, lit the fuse and stood back to watch a spectacular display of organic growth!' These paintings reflect that exuberance and reveal the light and compositional possibilities of a small wood.

FFIONA LEWIS's two paintings in oil on board are from her Green Tapestry series, the term taken from Beth Chatto's description of the inspirational garden of Cedric Morris. Unlike the direct observational drawings which inform them, the paintings are densely layered compositions of overlapping foliage, the greens tending to blue in one and to yellow in the other.

ALAN TURNBULL's woodcuts and monoprints are inspired by the blackbirds in the trees on the way to his garden studio. Interested in Japanese 19th Century printmaking and the response of European artists, eg Van Gogh, to it, he is increasingly drawn to clarity of design. There are watercolours of cherry and blackthorn blossom and a woodcut, Japanese Garden, of the irises in the stream through his garden.

JEVAN WATKINS JONES's studio sits in a garden on a hill above the River Lark in Suffolk. For him the act of drawing and painting mirrors the natural processes he is preoccupied with as a gardener. In contrast to the classifying externality of botanical art, his studies are empathetic responses, establishing a rhythm that can serve as an expressive sign of a plant's unfolding unity or slow decay.