Burn the Garden Green

Burn the Garden Green comes from a Jimi Hendrix lyric (I forget which song). Why green? Well, I undertook an online painting course in 2023, and one exercise encouraged us to step outside our comfort zones. My preferred colour schemes always tended to avoid the colour green, so I experimented with mixing colours in this part of the spectrum. I started with a preliminary study and then amplified on this using a bit of underlying collage on a new piece of paper. It wasn’t until I started mixing the colours that I remembered a longstanding red-green colour blindness which limits my ability to see different shades of green. At various points in preparing the palette, I had to ask a fellow painter’s opinion on whether two separate mixes were olive, avocado or something else. Sometimes, all I was seeing was grey!

The free-form muse caused me to start creating blocks of colour, giving me the working title of ‘oblongs’. During the finishing stages, I added some stencilling and outlined many of the oblongs using a broken BBQ skewer dipped in ink. I now have a renewed respect for this previously maligned colour.