Pleasure Gardens

Abstract

This thesis is comprised of a series of paintings that study historical representations of styles, forms and symbols found in gardens. It is less a research project into the history, meaning, and rules of these different gardens throughout time and more of an appreciation, appropriation and reinvention in fantastical form. There is no attempt in these paintings to represent objects or things that exist in the physical world, but instead a desire to create a new fantasy world. The image of ‘garden as paradise’ has been part of our human mythos for a very long time. The image of ‘garden of eden’ appears in the old testament of the Bible. There was a similar early image of ‘garden as paradise’ in Zoroastrian beliefs in ancient ‘Persia’.