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What does a gardener see when crouching down? Another garden. Not the one visible from the path — formal, manicured — but the reverse side: stems, intertwining, dark pockets of shadow from which buds emerge.
I spent over an hour in front of this bush and couldn't understand what held me there. White roses above — cold, restrained, almost porcelain. And below — three marigolds, terracotta, dense, stubbornly warm. They shouldn't have ended up next to each other, but they did, and between them arose a tension that I tried to capture on paper. A strip of yellow-green light falling diagonally — the only hint that beyond this green curtain the rest of the world exists.
Technically, I built this work from dark to light — in reverse. First I laid down the general green mass, then washed out the light areas from it, leaving the roses as white gaps in the foliage. This technique — negative painting — requires patience: you don't paint the flower, you paint everything that surrounds it, and it emerges by itself, like a photograph in a developer tray. The marigolds, conversely, are painted with direct, confident brushstrokes: their red is the only thing applied over all the layers, the last word in the conversation.
Sometimes the most honest thing in a garden is what grows uninvited.