Urban Gardens and the Passing of Time

Over this past year, I moved from central Wisconsin to the woods of northern Wisconsin, and then finally this fall settled in Madison. Over that time, I started to become far more aware of my immediate surroundings. I grew up in central Wisconsin and lived in that area for much of my life. Those surroundings were familiar and safe. Living in the north woods, I found amazing and inspiring beauty. Moving to Madison, I was afraid I would miss seeing woods and water directly outside my window, but I was so pleasantly surprised to find a different kind of beauty in Madison. I was lucky enough to move into a neighborhood inhabited by skilled gardeners. Walking through my neighborhood, I started to notice all the unique garden designs and plant choices made by my neighbors—or the professionals they hired to assist them. (Either way, as a non-gardener, the visual impact is still great.)

The undeniable links between the natural world and the human experience are both fascinating and comforting in a world that seems to be growing increasingly complicated and hurried. In these particular paintings, I’ve been working with the concepts of time and change over time by depicting urban garden plants at different stages throughout the seasons of fall and winter. In addition, the garden as a “human-orchestrated” form of nature has been a crucial idea in this series.

In considering the concept of time in terms of all its forms, measures, and impacts on humans, I started to think specifically about time in the social and cultural framework of contemporary life. I decided to look more closely at my day-to-day surroundings and all the influences pulling on average folks such as myself. I saw a lot of people like me. Happy to get by with what they have—a few spots of rust on their old cars, the signs of a wrinkle or two at the corners of their eyes, clothes from a second-hand store. Rust, wrinkles, wear and tear—these things all happen over time. It finally occurred to me that this way of life accepts the progress of time and changes that happen naturally over that progression. After making this connection, I then started to see the many forms of social and media pressures screaming messages trying to drag my sights in another direction—Don’t let your face age naturally, don’t let your car get old, don’t let your clothes go out of date! These voices are everywhere--on TV, on the internet, in shopping malls, on the shiny magazine covers at the check out aisle in the grocery store. Essentially, these messages are saying, “Don’t let time happen to you!”

Mulling all this over on walks through my neighborhood, I returned my observations to my physical surroundings. The seasons changed from cool, crunchy autumn, to the first snow fall, and then to all the subsequent inches upon inches of snow. Despite the change in seasons, the gardens I passed hadn’t been cut down, but were still there underneath it all. I saw frozen stalks and stems plunging out of snow drifts. I saw plants, long since gone to seed, balancing headdresses of snow on their delicate crowns. What I first saw as plants in a garden, I now saw as quiet, graceful totems to the undeniable progression of time. In these paintings, it is my goal to put them on a pedestal or at least carve out a little visual space for this particular area of life where humanity and nature intersect, where time is allowed and accepted.