Garden Chair II: Nasturtium Invasion

I love nasturtium, its cheerful flowers in yellow, red and orange, its leaves and flowers that can be eaten in salads, its immature seeds that can be pickled as false capers, or left to drop on the ground so that the following Spring new plants will grow. A corner of my little garden in early Autumn…

I cannot remember painting exclusively in black and white. I usually start a painting in monochrome to establish the composition; I think of it as the structure, the bones of a painting, and therefore I like to use white over black. Often that underpainting is lost under the layers of colour, but in my last painting (Garden Chair: Rose, Tomato & Passiflora), I used transparent layers of oil colours so that the structure showed through. And so from that to this, a memory of Autumn as a response to the darkest and shortest days of the year.