Jane Frederick

‘Since her appointment as Essex Gardens Trust Artist in residence in early 2021 Jane Frederick has been running, as part of her Garden Seekers project, a programme of ‘Tour & Draw’ workshops, the last of which was held at Audley End House in July 2023. Subsequently she held an exhibition of her work at Audley End. The exhibition responded to the idea of ‘old garden magic’ in a contemporary context. Her aim has been to focus attention on key features and perspectives within six treasured gardens in Essex: Audley End, Easton Lodge, Markshall Estate, Warley Place, Cressing Temple Barns, and the Gibberd Garden’.

In May 2024 Jane  together with Siobhan Pierce – EGT Writer in-Residence held EGT’s first 'Sketch and Scribe' workshop at Fete restaurant in Chelmsford and explored the theme of the nearby 'City Park Gardens'. Everyone really enjoyed the day, and produced some excellent sketches and creative writing pieces that reflected the inspiration and variety of the City Park Gardens. The experience particularly emphasised to everyone the importance of protecting and enhancing our precious green spaces in an urban environment.

Artist in Residence blog May 2021: How the Garden Seekers Project started.

Formal gardens have captured the imaginations of artists for centuries; from the detailed 1st century AD frescoes on the fated villa walls in Pompeii, to Ivor Abraham’s 1970 Privacy Plots print series which explores the influence of Victorian garden formality on British suburban gardens.

Although they were made nearly two thousand years apart, both examples reflect our desire to manipulate nature and create a green enclosure, a man made boundary between the private domain and the outside world.

The medieval hortus conclusus (garden enclosed) was originally developed in monasterial cloistered gardens as a space for prayer and meditation. These green rooms were later adopted by Renaissance garden designers and modified to create divisions and structures, which formed specific spaces to discover and move through in a private property.

My own long-term fascination with formal gardens inspired The Green Room, a series of paintings and drawings which investigates the geometry and ambiguity of formal garden design and how it feels to view and interact with them.

I began the research process by examining garden design on a wider level. Visits to the majestic Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain offered an introduction to the Islamic approach to formal design and rococo ideas came from the Palace of Sanssouci in Potsdam in Germany. On my travels across Britain, the most memorable experiences included navigating the maze at Somerleyton Hall in Norfolk and sketching the extraordinary, swollen topiary forms at Levens Hall, Cumbria. I had the good fortune to be admitted into the gardens at dusk and for a short precious time, imagined those wondrous gardens were there for me alone.

It has however, been the experience of the Italian Villas in Tuscany and Villa D’Este near Rome which have been the most influential. They have offered a glimpse of the ‘garden magic’ that Edith Wharton proposed in her celebrated book Italian villas and their gardens. Writing about the Villa D’Este in Tivoli, she described how:

“ The grounds are not large, but the impression produced is full of a tragic grandeur. The villa towers above so high and bare, the descent from terrace to terrace is so long and steep, there are such depths of mystery in the infinite green distances and in the cypress-shaded pools of the lower garden, that one has a sense of awe rather than of pleasure in descending from one level to another of darkly rustling green.”  (1904, p 144)

I quickly became interested in the harmony and proportion of the Italian Renaissance garden, and keen to provoke some of the ‘mystery and awe’ that Wharton wrote about. I could certainly feel it as I sat quietly sketching under the searing Tuscan sun. Renaissance gardens reflect the Italian architect Leon Batista Alberti’s proposal that the garden should be designed as an integral part of the home. A space to live, work and play. Parallels can be made with our need to section, divide and contain the spaces where we live both indoors and out. I can distinctly remember as a child, exploring the vast gardens at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and how strangely secure and incredibly familiar they seemed to be.

The carefully designed and structured garden rooms began to echo the safe and comfortable spaces in the home, all interlinked but having separate identity and purpose. None of the Green Room paintings however depict a real space. They are all fictitious spaces that exist as an illusion. These spaces attempt to lead the viewer to believe that they are in a labyrinth. Some offer an outsider’s viewpoint; others can evoke a sense of being lost or cornered. Michael Archer wrote about this in his text which accompanied the exhibition:

 “In these pictures the hedges supply a stage of deeply satisfying pictorial forms and structures. At first they appear decorative and enticing, suggesting that one could walk between them but the more one looks the more one can see that many are impossible and act as barriers rather than inviting exploration. Elaborate formal gardens with high hedges have always seemed mysterious to me, invoking overheard conversations clandestine meetings and the tantalising image of a figure scene fleetingly at the end of an allée which when sought appears to have disappeared into thin air.”

The hedge shapes in the paintings are useful compositional devices which can be viewed as three-dimensional natural forms or abstracted textural shapes. This idea evolved from a deep interest in early Renaissance painting. I am intrigued by the relationship between the rather flattened architectural spaces and forms and the highly modelled figures common to artists working in the late 15th century such as Domenico Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli. A little later in the early 16th century Lorenzo Lotto deployed green cloth drapes in his paintings as a spatial, compositional device to dramatic effect. The dark drapery emphasises the figures placed in front of it whilst concealing the image beyond.

Pictures above: Lorenzo Lotto The Virgin and child with saints 1506. Jane Frederick Compartment acrylic on canvas 1999. Jane Frederick Axis acrylic on canvas 1998. Jane Frederick Terrace acrylic on canvas 1998.

By placing children in and around the dense clipped green forms in the paintings, my aim was to explore the garden as a metaphor for the complex human journey into adolescence. Inviting the viewer to navigate unknown territories where the route is visible but unclear. Archer goes on to say:

 “The children in these pictures are just visiting. The garden with its hedges does not belong to them; they have come for the day bringing a football and a picnic. They have alluded the adults but have not escaped each other. Although some are looking at others, their glances are not returned. The boys laughing uproariously are laughing separately not together. The idea of running round a maze or walking in a bright topiary garden suggests carefree happiness but the reality often involves indifference, introspection, exclusion or the minor cruelties which the young deliberately or inadvertently inflict on one another. All these feelings are here and they are emphasised by the hedges, which separate the figures or bring them together while also providing the dislocations of plane and perspective which keep us guessing.”

Ultimately there are so many similarities between the language of garden design and the language of painting. Colour, shadow, texture, form and compositional explorations continue to underpin my work and attempt to fuse the two. It has been very interesting for me to revisit early work that formed the seed of today’s Garden Seekers Project. Twenty years later, the pandemic has affirmed the positive effect that gardens can have on the individual and the community. We need gardens and green spaces now more than ever. Our relationship with gardens continues to evolve and so will, I hope, the audience relationship with the Green Room paintings.

Jane Frederick May 2021

The Green Room was first exhibited at Firstsite Minories Art Gallery Colchester Essex June 19-July 24 1999

Michael Archer is a retired senior research curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum

You can explore the work of Ivor Abrahams here.

All Green Room photos © Jane Frederick

Welcome to the Garden Seekers Project

I first encountered the term Garden Seeker in Patricia J. Osmond’s anthology of essays ‘Revisiting the Gamberaia’ to describe the enthusiastic cultural tourists in search of the great gardens of Italy at the turn of the twentieth century. As I embark upon my exciting new role as Artist in Residence with Essex Gardens Trust in their 25th anniversary year, I will be following in their footsteps to seek out the unforgettable gardens of our county, those lost, found and restored as I re-imagine them and explore the relationship between gardens and contemporary art.

Annual family pilgrimages to Chatsworth Estate in Derbyshire germinated my life long fascination with formal gardens and their enduring ability to provoke strong feelings of wonder, surprise and delight. Those seemingly endless beech hedges, flamboyant fountains and Arcadian vistas formed a green theatrical stage for my imagination. The formal garden quickly became associated with thrilling adventures and offered endless inspiration for making art. Art School soon helped me to appreciate how sitting and drawing offers one quality time to stop, to be present in the moment and to really see the environment, to absorb the genius loci or the spirit of the place.

Armed with my companion sketchbooks I still find no greater pleasure and challenge than finding new ways to make energetic drawn marks, smudges and dramatic tonal shapes to build a visual language that communicates something of the atmosphere of the place. It is well known that garden design and painting share a rich common language including colour, form, perspective, chiaroscuro and pattern. It is the sensory impact that formal gardens can have on us that I explore through my large drawings and paintings. Often circular in format, my aim is to create a sort of lens that pulls the viewer in and invites them to re-imagine the garden and experience it from a different point of view.

An invitation…

Throughout my residency I am excited to reach out to EGT members and garden lovers and warmly invite you to become a garden seeker too by following this regular blog and the project website at www.gardenseekersproject.co.uk

Please do get in touch if you would like to find out more.

The views expressed by the Artist in Residence are those of the contributor and do not necessarily represent those of Essex Gardens Trust. Whilst every effort is made to check the information provided, the Editor and Essex Gardens Trust cannot be held responsible for any inaccuracies contained therein.