Summer
by Anne Denniss
My Mother had several ornamental vases. They were hand painted with big flourishes of strong colour. I painted this particular vase made of white china three times. One is a bright yellow version entitled ‘My Mother’s Vase’ -- a watercolour of Narcissi with cobalt-blue shadows and pools of translucent paint, which is vibrant and cheerful. I showed this in the first OOSOOM exhibition I entered.
In contrast, ‘Summer’ is in places heavily painted, laden with the rich fruits of my Mother’s flower garden: poppies, yellow and red, offset the delphiniums -- a florid cascade of colour. The light translucency and floating quality of ‘My Mother’s Vase’ is gone; in its place, a heavy cylindrical form rests on a sea of foliage and poppies of all shapes and sizes -- the painting is almost abstract. The green shadow below is dense and gives form to the onion-shaped base of the vase. This painting had been resting in my paper drawer for years. I thought it was too busy and wild to frame and exhibit. But now I have framed it I am glad; the image takes on a different meaning. It feels rich and wild -- perhaps just like my Mother’s flower garden was. She spent hours tending it; it was really beautiful, and I had the impression it was place of solace for her.
For me it was a place where I could pick flowers to arrange, which I loved to do; this is something I continued to do at Redhall walled garden and at the Buddhist centre on the Meadows. My father grew vegetables and fruit and was up at 5 every morning to -- as he put it -- ‘labour in the vineyard’. My Mother’s health was challenging, and when I asked him after she had died how he had coped, he said quite simply ‘I dug the garden’.
By the time these paintings were executed my mother had died, but my obsession with her and her possessions was still alive.
Through therapy and EMDR in my sixties, I came to understand that my Mother did love me but that she was very unwell. What she gifted me was her love of nature, of flowers and colour. I can still remember the challenges we had but they are no longer painful; I can remember the other sides of her nature -- the softness before she became unwell and the awareness she gained after receiving ECT. After the hard winter of so many decades came the warmth of Summer.