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REFLECTIONS ON THE ROMAN GARDEN

 

PATRICK EYRES

 

The cloud-dark sky announcing a storm bathes house and temples with the magical light of foreboding. This evocation is among the numerous paintings that address the atmospherics and physicality of Little Sparta; they are complemented by smaller pictures that illuminate the garden’s intimacies, such as the treasury of marble eggs within a bird’s nest. Alongside watercolour and drawing, Janet Boulton’s art embraces reliefs made by collage from moulded paper as well as maquettes for marble sculpture. It is the variety of representation within the diversity of her practice that evokes the garden’s various dynamics.

 

Little Sparta occupies that liminal space between upland fields and open fell, and commands a panorama that encompasses the immediate fellside and a horizon of undulating hills. The elongated length of four, narrow horizontal watercolours (6.5 x 208cm) explores the garden as part of this wider landscape. Garden features are translated into motifs and set amidst elements characteristic of the landscape’s extensive sweep: the green of bough and fields blends the garden’s English Parkland with surrounding pastures; the gateway inscribed, The Fluted Land, integrates the way-in with ploughed fields and a distant hill reminiscent of Tinto; the drystone walls of the poem, Little Fields Long Horizons , unite garden and landscape; The Saint Just column, placed as a moorside eyecatcher at the far end of the lochan, recollects the pedestal’s elegiac inscription: The World Has Been Empty Since The Romans. These panoramas are complemented by four typographic paper reliefs.

 

Through her fascination with the Roman Garden Boulton has developed a progressively abstract use of motif. Her imaginative response to this garden within a garden has generated five series of works in various media —watercolour drawings, paper reliefs and foamboard maquettes for sculpture — and each series comprises six evocative works; a figure doubtless suggested by the number of inscribed sculptures in the Roman Garden. One series of watercolour drawings identifies each sculpture within its individual stageset of potted hosta plants (hosta sieboldiana); the other collages together motifs selected from the sculptures into a pair of abstract compositions, each of three sections. Indeed the latter and all the reliefs were created as collages of these sculptural motifs. This process was spurred on by the mutual interest of painter and poet in the Cubist collages invented by Georges Braque, and especially (as will be seen) by his juxtaposition of ‘found’ words and numbers. However, the process used to produce the paper reliefs drew on her own technical innovation, which involves the following: hand-cutting the mould so that it is both inside out and in the reverse of the form of each composition; hand-making and hand-dyeing the pulp of wet paper; pressing the pulp directly into each mould.

 

Whereas some of her reliefs are white, evoking marble, the ambition for her foamboard maquettes is to be carved in marble. Other reliefs employ colours suggested by the fabric of the Roman Garden: the black of the cypress trees; red from the sandstone pavement and terracotta flowerpots; the pale ochre of the miniature fleet in Purbeck stone; blue-green from the leaf-waves of the hosta plants; the white of the hosta flowers; blue from the symbol and text on the fuselage of the warplane (the star-stripes roundel and the word ‘navy’) — colours used in Roman wall painting.

 

Perhaps the artist’s enthusiasm for this hermetic corner of Little Sparta stems from her familiarity with Italian gardens. The Roman Garden both embraces and updates the tradition of warship sculptures in Roman and Renaissance gardens, and Finlay’s collective title for his six sculptures — Homage to the Villa D’Este — invokes the sixteenth-century water gardens of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, near Rome. Thus it should not be surprising that some of Finlay’s sculptures invoke American vessels of the Cold War: Nautilus, the nuclear-powered submarine; Fly Navy, the carrier-borne Phantom jet; Stack, the funnel (a.k.a. stack) of the aircraft carrier USS ‘Enterprise’; Bird-table, the helicopter carrier USS ‘Iwo Jima’. Finlay’s minimalism has shaped the aircraft carrier sculptures by emphasising details of their form and, in each case, the inscribed title is transformative: Stack transforms funnel into abstract sculpture; Torso translates another carrier into a classical nude; the garden’s Bird-table is the flat-top of a carrier’s flightdeck; rain water collects in the Bird-bath shaped by the two aircraft lifts on the deck of a further carrier.

 

Boulton is captivated by the semi-abstract modernity of Finlay’s sculpture, and it is this that inspired her selection of sculptural motifs. Her repertoire encompasses carrier silhouettes, the stack, the submarine’s conning tower, the warplane’s star-stripes roundel, and the numbers 571, 105 and 14 that adorn warships and the jet, as well as several words from the inscribed titles: ‘Fly’, ‘Fly Navy’ and ‘The Villa D’Este’. The transhistorical resonance of the phrase, ‘The Villa D’Este’, combined with the forms of certain motifs, evokes gardenist elements such as the topiary of the famous Renaissance garden, while the star-stripes roundel suggests a flowerhead.

 

Finlay’s Bird-table and Bird-bath readily focus attention on the pacific flight of garden birds as they swoop down to land, bathe and take off once again. Ever responsive, a significant theme in Boulton’s Roman Garden series is the dynamic of flight, whereby abstract motifs of birds and planes become features of each composition. Flight is clearly invoked by the words ‘Fly’ and ‘Fly Navy’, by the star-stripes roundel and by a profusion of birds. Within the three series of reliefs certain motifs synthesise jets and birds. However, in the foamboard maquettes the various forms of birds stem from the abstract composition: wave birds, wings curved like waves; air birds, wings curved in flight; jet birds, wings sweptback like warplanes. Throughout these five series of works, it is Boulton’s festival of flight that encapsulates a dynamic integral to the Roman Garden.

 

Whereas Janet Boulton’s watercolours constitute an empathetic record of Little Sparta, it is through the rich diversity of media and motif in her Roman Garden series that the painter articulates her homage to Finlay’s poetic gardening.