Gardens in Art - a new squidoo lens

The Lemon Tree House
19.5" x 25.5", pastel on rembrandt pastel card
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I've created two new Squidoo Lens - one for Gardens in Art and one for Flowers in Art. They include (or will do shortly) links to:

• all the Making A Mark blogposts for each project
  
• all the Making A Mark blog posts labelled 'gardens' (or flowers)
• a link to the search results for all MAM blog posts mentioning "garden" (or "flower")
  
• books mentioned during the course of the project
  
• hyperlinks to information on different websites identified as part of the project

The Gardens in Art lens has just been set up and will look more like the Flowers in Art one as it progresses. I still have to include all the hyperlinks identified during the course of the project in the Flowers in Art lens but will be doing that in the near future.

All in all these lens are intended to be the place where I will be keeping all the links I want to know about or use in relation to visiting and drawing and painting gardens (or flowers). There's a facility to rate the lenses for anybody who would like to do so.

I'm minded to include links to the blogs of people who draw or paint blogs of gardens or flowers on a regular basis. I can do a link to the label for "garden" or "gardens" and "flowers" - which will then pick up all relevant posts if they are suitably labelled. Just let me know if you'd like a link and what you use to identify your relevant posts.

The Lemon Tree House (May 1995)

One of the interesting things about drawing and painting plein air in different parts of the world is you get to learn how quite ordinary things can vary in different parts of the world. For example, "The Lemon Tree House" is a pastel painting of a small and rather old Greek house (in Volissos on the Aegean island of Chios) which only had lemon trees in the garden around the house. These then threw amazing shadows onto the white painted walls of the house. And that's not dodgy perspective drawing - the wall was in fact falling down and lurching very badly! At the side of the garden was a field containing amazing wild flowers. It struck me as a very appropriate way to garden in a small rural village in Greece.

It's not the best painting I've ever done but it was the first one when I began to realise what I might be able to accomplish using pastels and a larger support as it generated a "Wow" reaction from everybody I was painting with. I completed it in one sitting of maybe two and half hours in pastels on an abrasive support (Rembrandt pastel card). It measures 19.5" x 25.5".

Links:

• Gardens in Art - Resources for Artists
• Flowers in Art - Resources for Artists
• Pastels and Pencils - Houses and Gardens Gallery