The Royal Greenhouse
IRIS print

from the original Watercolor on paper, 24 ” by 18 ”, 1981
Painted on site inside a Greenhouse at The Laeken Royal Glasshouses,
Brussels, Belgium.

Note: Please click on closeups for detailed images.

This painting was created in Brussels Belgium inside the Royal Glass Houses over the course of about seven months while  I was pursuing independent post-graduate studies at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp through grants from the Fulbright Commission and The Belgian Ministry of Dutch Culture. In addition to pursuing  my own painting I was studying the Belgian painters Ensor, Breugel,  Rubens and Van Eyck and Northern Renaissance painting techniques. In my painting, I am interested in how light and color discovered through direct observation uncovers and inspires the spirit and poetry in observed reality.

I was living and studying in Antwerp, so I had to travel daily to reach the site, a trip that took about two hours each way  but  seemed longer because of  all the equipment I had to carry.The commute involved a train and bus ride followed by a  walk to the palace grounds past sentries to the “check-in” booth. I would arrive in the early morning and leave in the late afternoon.

I was very fortunate to have been granted special permission to paint inside these incredible greenhouses, as they are only open to the public once a year for a brief window of time during the spring. The only other people I  saw inside this glass complex during the six or seven months that I spent painting there were the attendant gardeners and guards.

When I first arrived, I was given what felt to me like ambassadorial treatment, most notably at lunch time when I was ushered into the enormous royal kitchen,  -its high ceilings hung with all manner of highly-polished copper cookware, and where an animated chef in classic cook’s whites replete with towering muffin hat set before me a delicious spread of  hot fresh breads, cheeses, pastries and coffee with steaming milk while I sat at a gleaming banquet-sized table. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a mistake and the following day the head gardener showed me to a cafeteria-like house where the workers took their lunch.

In order to get to the long glass corridor in which this painting was executed,  I had to pass through a maze-like complex of other equally intriguing greenhouses; an orangerie with enormous ancient citrus trees, a palatial high-domed tropical greenhouse with towering palm trees and other exotic colorful plants, through the twists and turns of various glass rooms and  hallways with marble sculptures and fountains that opened and turned into still other glass hallways and corridors, -not unlike a puzzle-maze or a system of Chinese boxes. I had to carefully memorize the route I took to my ultimate painting destination in order not to get lost.

One of the many entrancing features of this greenhouse complex was the way the glassed-in interior space communicated with the palace grounds. For the most part the lower panes weren’t frosted over the way they are in many greenhouse, but were crystal clear, allowing for intriguing glimpses through the myriad vines and plantings of the surrounding pastoral landscape.

It was at the end of the longest glass corridor that I set up, cross-legged on the ornate iron grate that ran the length of the walkway, with my watercolor block,  painting equipment (and thermos) beside me. I couldn’t lean back because of all the vines and plantings. The main vines were climbing geraniums in dazzling colors. There were also climbing fuchsias interspersed with fragrant heliotrope. I worked on this particular painting during rainy and overcast days (which meant  most days in Belgium). when the sun came out,  I worked on another  piece in a nearby corridor

The creative process, Watercolors, and Direct Observation

For me the immediacy and intensity of being in this environment very much influenced how and what I saw. As I get closer to finishing any painting, but especially a watercolor piece , more and more options have been closed off, so that in a sense one is made to work slower during those last few conclusive sessions; as opposed to the very beginning when anything seems possible. During the final stages when completing an art work,  a new more precise kind of chance encounter occurs within the given variables requiring increasingly complex decision-making, receptivity and fine tuning. For example I might have  had the good fortune to have left an area open into which a blossom falls or the changing  light illuminates an area creating a new color in one open corner of the composition that alters the feel of the piece and changes the subsequent color decisions in surprising subtle or powerful ways.

Outside elements play a  role in directing and redirecting ones hand in the creative process.  By actually being there, first hand, as opposed to working from memory or a photograph –one step removed as it were from the subject of inspiration, one is open, in a sense,  to allow a kind of “serendipitous poetry” to come into ones work.

I currently work both from direct observation as well as from memory and other images, including photographs, and there is a different kind of serendipity that comes into play; perhaps having more to do with thoughts and memories that trigger and inspire the imagination which is the critical protagonist in the drama of creating any work of art. Unexpected twists and turns occur in the paint itself creating a concurrent abstract dialogue within the piece, so that I am still triggered imaginatively  but the trigger is now increasingly the painting itself as opposed to, and/or as well as, an observed reality.