Thing in the Garden

The Thing in the Forest #2, watercolor and graphite on handmade paper, copyright Nina Leung, 2017

 Been working in the garden again. Every rock I turn over holds some delightfully wiggly creature whose image stays with me. I just can't get that A.S Byatt imagery out of my head. That Thing in the Forest was so grotesquely described by Byatt and is so fitting to my personal experience in the garden, only on a much smaller scale.  The strange creatures we find that are right outside our door or maybe even closer. Our yard is full of salamanders from 2" in length to as many as 8" as well as tons of roly poly's and snails and fat spiders with spindly legs.

  After my last couple paintings on the handmade paper, I felt the need to create some problems for myself and work on more obviously handmade paper. This paper is really weird! It acts like a blotter paper, it soaks up the paint immediately, no time to move it and the surface is so ragged it's impossible to get a smooth line, which is almost a necessity for me. It proved to be quite a challenge. I couldn't fight that raggedness and had to embrace it and try to find it's advantages. This is the beauty and the fun of the creative process, creating problems, finding problems and then trying to fix them or use them to advantage. I got a little outside help with this when midway through the painting, my three year old woke early from her nap and quietly went to the room I was painting in, pulled a dropper full of concentrated watercolor and proceeded to randomly drop paint all over! Completely spoiled all my plans. But, after much thought, those drops created a new possibility and I'm so happy with the results. If it weren't for her meddling, I would not have taken the risks that I was forced to. Thank you Elsa, my collaborator.

The Thing in the Forest

The Thing in the Forest, watercolor, copyright Nina Leung, 2017

  "It's head appeared to form, or become first visible in the distance, between the trees. Its face-which was triangular-appeared like a rubbery or fleshy mask over a shapeless sprouting bulb of a head, like a monstrous turnip. Its colour was the colour of flayed flesh, pitted with wormholes, and its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery. Its more defined feature was a vast mouth, pulled down at the corners, tight with a kind of pain. Its lips were thin, and raised, like welts from whipstrokes. It has blind, opaque white eyes, fringed with fleshy lashes and brows like the feelers of sea-anenomes. Its face was close to the ground, and moved towards the children between its forearms which were squat, thick, powerful, and akimbo, like a cross between a monstrous washerwoman and a primeval dragon. The flesh on these forearms was glistening and mottled. every colour, from the green mould to the red-brown of raw liver, to the dirty white of dry rot." - A.S Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories

New to Gardening

Magnolia bloom with kangaroo paw in the background.

I've been spending a lot of time in our garden lately. Spring is almost here and for the first time since we moved into this house 6 years ago, I feel the need to start taking care of it. It was reading about roses that got me started. I learned that the end of January is the time to prune roses. The garden has a lot of roses that we have been ignoring this whole time. After reading a how-to in a Sunset gardening book and watching a few tutorials on YouTube, I gave it go. Once I started, I couldn't stop. It's like sculpting. It started with the roses and now I'm pruning trees and shrubs and digging up weeds and clearing away dead leaves and branches. Now I understand why people like to garden. It feels good to dig in the dirt, watch the first buds sprout, and know that worms crawling in the soil means it's healthy.
Today, while clearing muddy dirt from the root of a rose vine, I was reminded of a short story written by A.S Byatt about a little girl who ventures into a forest and speaks to a large slug. It's a strange story and full of magical and vivid imagery. It's a beautiful, modern fairy tale. I wonder of A.S Byatt is a gardener?

Research: The Fine Details, Garden

After looking at and studying so many gardens, now I want to focus on the finer details, a more close up look at individual plants and flowers. I've always loved botanical illustrations for their minute details and the careful use of pen and ink. Two of the books above, The Complete Encyclopedia of Illustration and Cabinet of Natural Curiosities are perfect fodder for that. The Victorians and their love and discovery of the natural sciences has always been of particular interest. A.S Byatt's two novellas, Angels and Insects illustrates that time so well and in such a creepy, wicked way. Her gorgeously written prose is full of great imagery. Naked: Flowers Exposed is a beautiful photography book full of black and white close ups of flowers. 

I have so much to study and research while I create drawings and paintings and maybe even add a little printmaking.