Creating Art Inspired by the Garden – The Story Behind My Latest Floral Painting

Let’s create art inspired by the garden! This week, I share a couple of short videos about my latest painting called Jardin.

Let’s Finish a Painting – Making of “Jardin”

This video shows parts of the painting process, and it only has music. It’s a shortened version of the video that I published a couple of weeks ago. >> See the longer version here!

The Story Behind the Painting

Here’s the second video where I talk about the ideas behind the painting and share inspiration from our garden.

Transcript: We have two gardens – one in the back, one in the front.

As a painter, I often think of Claude Monet, who had his garden in France over 100 years ago. He said that the light and the air vary continually in the garden. And it’s so true. Every day, the light, the weather, birds, growth, and decay make our gardens look different.

Capturing the cycle of life is important to me. In this painting, plants at different stages are gathered in a tree-like vase. Right in the middle, there’s a bud that’s just about to open.

Monet once said he’d like to paint the way a bird sings. I think about birds a lot too – not their song, but their flight. I’d love to paint the way a bird flies. Imagine if their paths left trails in the sky, adding new shapes to the landscape. That’s the richness of nature’s motifs that I wanted to capture in this piece.

The hardest part was connecting the earth and the sky. A garden needs water and light, so it acts like a mirror to the sky. And the stronger the roots, the higher you can reach.

I brought the blue of the sky down to the bottom and filled the top so your eyes always have somewhere to land. Even a small garden can feel endless with layered plantings. That feeling of infinite space is what I wanted to create in this painting too.

I hope these two videos inspired you to paint and draw inspired by flowers, plants, and the beauty of gardens!