Artist's celebration of Denman Gardens

Sue, a SKY Arts Landscape Artist of the Year finalist, became Denmans Garden’s inaugural artist in residence last year. Since then, she has been a regular visitor to the gardens, interpreting the changing seasons and bringing her own creative take to the place. The result is a broad body of work in various media which goes on show in the Pavilion at Denmans Garden from September 22-October 20.

Gwendolyn van Paasschen, owner of Denmans Garden and chairman of the John Brookes-Denmans Foundation, its charitable arm, invited Sue to take up the post – a chance to explore the spirits of Joyce Robinson and John Brookes, who created Denmans and lived there.

“It felt quite a different challenge for me, and I'm always up for something different!” Sue said. “Gwendolyn was always very free and open in what she was wanting. She told me about the history of the garden and about Joyce Robinson who started it and John Brookes who developed a design school there. We're talking about two very prestigious garden designers and she told me how it had evolved, what the ethos was, what the character of each of them was and what they brought to it. She wanted me to know that full background. But otherwise she was really free.

“It's quite a small garden compared to a lot of the big public gardens but the lovely thing was that there were no strings attached. I had access to the garden any time of the day or night and in fact I did sneak in quite late on a couple of occasions and quite early a couple of times, in the winter in particular when I wanted to see it on a frosty morning. I wanted to get a feel for the garden in different lights and in different atmospheres, especially those winter months when it does feel so different. I did know Denmans beforehand. I used to take my mother there in her wheelchair so it was definitely familiar. Before Gwendolyn took it over it had become quite run down after John Brookes died, but what they are doing now with the restoration is just fantastic.”

Sue relished the challenge: “I'm a landscape painter and I'm very influenced by open spaces and air and clouds and just by the open landscape and that's really not what you get here. There are no horizon lines. There is none of those long vistas that I like. I usually paint in broad simplifying blocks and I couldn't do that. With this garden it was all about the detail. I really struggled for a while and I had to change how I painted. And that was good! But it was quite a challenge. You get set in your ways. So it's really good to be pushed to do things in a different way and to learn. It really was a challenge but it was really enjoyable. Also I didn't want to just document the seasons in sequence. I didn't just want to do a walk through a year in the gardens. It's about how you perceive the spaces, how they relate to each other at different times but not sequential.”