Artist Statement

Garden of Infinite Dreams

I fell in love with the tangled, extravagant gardens of the Panamanian rainforest.

Not the manicured garden, clipped and contained, but the garden that seems to have no beginning and no end—flowers appearing through leaves, vines climbing toward the light, colors colliding, disappearing and emerging again. Everything growing into everything else. There is something wonderfully dreamlike about it.

In Panama, the jungle never seems entirely still. Light moves across the leaves. Flowers appear where I hadn’t noticed them yesterday. Green lizards dart through flashes of purple and pink. Birds vanish into the canopy. After rain, everything seems newly saturated—as though someone has turned up the color of the world.

And increasingly, this is what I want to paint. Not simply what the garden looks like, but what it feels like to be inside it. Infinite Garden of Dreams grew from that desire. There is no conventional horizon. No carefully ordered flower bed. No single focal point telling the eye where it must go. Instead, color leads you deeper.

Violet gathers against luminous green. Pink blossoms emerge and dissolve. Whites flicker like sunlight. Darker passages create little pockets of mystery, while brighter marks seem to float forward from somewhere beyond them. The garden becomes less a physical place than an experience of abundance. And perhaps even a state of consciousness.

When I paint this way, I don’t begin by deciding precisely what every mark will become. I follow colour. Gesture. Instinct. Something catches my attention and I respond to it. One mark suggests another. A flower emerges unexpectedly. A patch of green suddenly needs violet beside it. I am interested in that moment when a painting begins to possess a life beyond my intentions.

It reminds me of the rainforest itself. Nothing appears to be controlling it, yet an extraordinary intelligence seems to run through everything. Life reaches toward light. Plants entwine. Flowers erupt. Old growth falls away. Something new appears in the space it leaves behind. There is wildness and complexity, but also an underlying harmony. Meaning is the deeper resonance, even when we may not yet know the meaning.

Perhaps that is why I called this painting Garden of Infinite Dreams. A dream doesn’t always explain itself. Neither does a garden.  Neither does a painting. Sometimes something simply resonates. A particular colour. A shaft of light. A flower glimpsed between leaves. A mysterious dark passage. We feel ourselves responding before the rational mind has found words for what we are experiencing. That is the territory I wanted this painting to inhabit.

Somewhere between garden and dream, observation and imagination, nature and spirit.

Painting in my chapel studio surrounded by the extraordinary abundance of Panama has changed the way I experience the natural world. The jungle no longer feels like scenery beyond the window.

It feels like a living creative force. A reminder that beauty does not always come from order. Sometimes beauty comes from profusion. From entanglement. From allowing one thing to grow into another. From following what fascinates us. From trusting what resonates. Infinite Garden of Dreams is my celebration of that endless becoming—a garden without edges, filled with colour, mystery, possibility and light.

Flowers emerging from colour.
Light appearing through darkness.
Life spilling into life.
And everywhere, another possibility waiting to bloom.

Perhaps the most beautiful gardens are not the ones we can completely understand. Perhaps they are the ones we can enter and continue dreaming.