Highly detailed and richly colored paintings of gardens by Canadian artist Judy Garfin. Her experiences traveling the world have inspired her work which she describes as an “interpretation of nature as a layered and complex experience.” In terms of her process, she builds up a painting on a white surface with no under painting or drawing underneath. Garfin finishes each element before moving on to the next and “each work grows into its own presence, element by element, on an undifferentiated field.”
I paint images of dried and living plant forms to describe an interior world rather than to represent external nature. These gardens, in their concrete description and diversity of forms, textures and patterns, are fictions that tell stories about living things. They follow the principle that the truer the form, the more powerful the life of the formless within it. In my plant paintings, the detailed elements, crowded up at the front, are a materialization of the space behind.
