Art and the Gardener: Taking a Fresh Look at Your Garden through Art

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. Hayward begins by exploring style: romanticism, expressionism, pattern and decoration, and others. 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 next explores many design principles you can put to work in your garden: defining depth, creating foreground/background, how light can be manipulated, the power of focal points, pleasing contrasts, framing, contrasting textures and forms and the many roles of trees in the garden. He closes with an exploration of color in paintings by Gauguin, Matisse, Bonnard and others, and how you can use paintings to inspire your color combinations in pots and beds. This is a lecture that enables you, through art, to take a fresh look at your garden from a new perspective. Refreshments served at 6:30 pm.