F I N E P A I N T I N G S A S I N S P I R A T I O N F O R G A R D E N D E S I G N
Gordon Hayward first presented this lecture at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1995. He has since been refining and presenting this slide-illustrated lecture in art museums and garden organizations across the country. This one-hour lecture is about the visual language shared between painters and garden designers. By juxtaposing a painting and a garden image on the screen, Hayward explores the many levels of similarity between how the painter and garden designer construct their images.
He begins by exploring style. For example, he places Childe Hassam’s In the Garden next to an image from his own garden in Vermont to show what an impressionist passage in a garden looks like. He also explores romanticism, abstract expressionism, cubism and other visual styles.
He then looks at several paintings by Bonnard, Cezanne, Monet and others as examples of paintings that show how gardeners can virtually copy ideas from painters when it comes to visually linking house to garden. He next moves into many design principles: composition, defining depth, creating foreground/background, how light can be manipulated, the power of focal points, pleasing contrasts, framing, contrasting textures and forms, the role of line, mass, volume, balance and harmony and how Gustav Klimt’s The Park shows the gardener how to keep trees pruned low to compress views under them. He closes with an exploration of color in paintings by Dufy, Gauguin, Matisse, and Amedeo Bocchi.
Other painters represented include Thomas Cole, Braque, Mondrian, VanGogh, Caillebotte, Joseph Stella, Daubigny, Rousseau and the American impressionist Frank Vincent DuMond. Above all, this is a lecture about seeing.
ABOVE TOP: A painting by Vermont artist, John Smith. BELOW: In the Haywards’ garden.