Tigers and Topiary

Original painting, watercolour and pastel on deckled rag paper Unframed dimensions: 100 cm (h) x 70 (w) cm International customers, please contact us directly via our Contact Us form to discuss shipping options. Description of Tigers and Topiary My paintings have always begun with the desire to create a complete world: somewhere dense enough to enter, intricate enough to become lost within, and alive enough to continue beyond the edges of the paper. In my earlier jungle and underwater paintings, those worlds existed without any visible human footprint. Their abundance took on new heights and overgrown realms in these works because humanity had not entered them. In my new work I’m introducing a new question. What happens when evidence of human presence appears within these ecosystems? Must our footprint always diminish the natural world, or could it become something beautiful—something that helps create the conditions in which other lives can flourish? Leaving a footprint of beauty rather than the opposite. In Tigers and Topiary, there are no human figures, but humanity has left positive traces everywhere. Paths climb through the garden. Water moves through pools and fountains. Trees have been clipped into spheres where birds can nest. The garden invites and belongs to the animals to come and go as they please. They climb the steps, rest beside the water and move between the terraces with the assurance of creatures who have always belonged there and are safe to roam. Birds have made nests on the topiary. Peacocks occupy the paths. This marks an important development in my work. In the earlier paintings, the absence of humanity allowed the ecosystem to remain intact. Here, I am asking whether our presence might be reimagined for something good. Can the human footprint become an act of hospitality? A invitation for nature to flourish. Can a fountain be more than an ornament and become a source of life? Can a shaped tree become both an expression of human invention and a home for another creature? Can the spaces we design encourage nature to enter, settle and become abundant? The topiary tigers in the distance sit at the heart of this enquiry. They are not living animals, but neither are they substitutes for them. They are acts of admiration: the human hand responding to the tiger’s beauty through invention. The living tigers and their cultivated echoes inhabit the same world. One is autonomous life; the other is evidence of our capacity to observe, imagine and make. Neither cancels the other. Together, they ask whether human creativity can participate in nature without needing to overpower it. For me, this is where the work becomes ecological. Ecology is not simply the presence of many plants and animals within a landscape; it is the relationship between them. Every part of this garden contributes to another. Water circulates. Topiary becomes habitat. Paths designed by one species are occupied by many others. Cultivation provides a structure through which abundance can spread. The painting is not really about its individual tigers, birds, flowers or fountains. Its subject is the living network they create together. Abundance matters deeply here. I wanted the garden to feel as though life had exceeded every boundary placed around it. Flowers grow to impossible proportions and push against the edges of the paper. Water glimmers through successive terraces. Animals appear at different distances, some immediately visible and others discovered only after time. The painting holds the order of a designed garden and the exuberance of a world that refuses to remain contained. That balance between structure and abundance is central to the Garden Series. The architecture does not interrupt nature; it enters into a dialogue with it. The paths, pools and cultivated forms give the composition order, but life continually softens, inhabits and exceeds them. Human design remains visible, yet it has ceased to be the most important presence. It has become one participant within a much larger ecosystem. The scale of Tigers and Topiary allows this world to be encountered physically as well as imaginatively. The steps offer an entrance, but no prescribed route. Paths disappear behind trees and re-emerge elsewhere. The eye moves between monumental foreground flowers, prowling tigers, nesting birds, flowing water and the distant formality of the garden. There is no single moment in which the painting gives itself away. I want the viewer to stay. Not ten seconds, but ten minutes—and then longer. To notice how one part of the garden leads to another; to discover a creature that was invisible at first; to follow a path without knowing where it ends. Slow looking is not separate from the meaning of the work. It is how its ecosystem becomes perceptible. The relationships reveal themselves gradually. The Garden Series is therefore not a departure from my jungle and underwater paintings. I am still creating imagined ecosystems in which animals possess the world and the viewer is invited to enter it. What has changed is the nature of the enquiry. The earlier paintings imagined abundance beyond the human footprint. The gardens ask whether abundance might also grow through the most generous possibilities of that footprint. I want these paintings to offer wonder and optimism. They are not predictions, and they do not pretend that coexistence is simple. They are imaginative propositions about what could be: places in which cultivation becomes hospitality, human invention leaves room for other lives, and beauty creates the conditions for further beauty. Tigers and Topiary is a world to lose yourself within, but it is also a world in which I hope the viewer might recognise a possibility worth finding. A garden alive with animals, shaped by imagination and abundant with the traces of a more generous relationship between humanity and the living world.