In these paintings the garden becomes a portrait, not of a place, but of a condition. It is a field of human intention, cultivated and composed, where desire presses against the untameable. The garden, like the psyche, carries both light and shadow: a site of order and obsession, of beauty built upon what it seeks to conceal. Each bush, each bloom, each chromatic decision is a negotiation with entropy, a conversation between control and its inevitable undoing.

 

These are constructed portraits: human-regulated natures, saturated with aesthetic will. In tending, pruning, and arranging, the garden becomes a private theatre of control, like an intervention of a choreography of care and dominance. The paintings are made of fragments, parts collected from different actual spaces, moments where the visual order of nature sparked my interest and left me contemplating colour, weight balance and that feeling of unstable un-stillness. Beneath this constructed surface order lies another world, dark and proliferating, indifferent to geometry. What is buried persists; what is hidden, colours the visible. The garden’s balance, like the self’s, depends upon its instability.

 

Saturated colour becomes the primary metaphor. It is both light and weight, emotion and architecture. As Matisse understood, colour is not the servant of nature but its rival, an agent that transforms sensation into structure, thought into flesh. In these works, colour performs that double role: it seduces while it destabilises, it illuminates while it blinds. Saturation becomes the psychic measure, vivid excess that hints at something repressed, something alive beneath control.

 

I think of the paintings as durational events, unfolding through time as perception itself does. Bergson reminds us that perception is not a static instant but a continuum; Merleau-Ponty reminds us that to see is to touch the world and to be touched by it in return. Painting, in this sense, is a reciprocal act, a slow inhabiting of what one sees. Each mark becomes a trace of that exchange, each colour a residue of thought and feeling as they coalesce into form. Cultivated spaces where identity and history intersect like overlapping transparencies. Each, in their way, constructs a field where perception, memory, and emotion fuse – where the seen world trembles under the weight of what it carries unseen.

 

In All Systems Tend Toward Disorder, I turn toward that trembling. The paintings dwell in the tension between cultivation and collapse, between the saturated surface and the shadowed ground beneath it. They are portraits not of nature alone but of the human desire to shape it, to find coherence within flux, and to confront, through colour, the instability of seeing itself.

 

To paint is to build a surface that remembers. To saturate it is to let the hidden pulse through. Between radiance and decay, these works search for a balance, not the stillness of perfection, but the poise of something always about to change.

Michael Greaves October 2025