I think of my paintings as treading boundaries boundary between the landscape genre and still
life genres, I suppose. What I want for them is that they capture a sense of time and place as
I've seen it, and then that they pass that experience on to others.
I'm Morgan Allender and I'm an artist gardener.
I left school at age 17, fresh out of a girl's college. I applied for a whole lot of different things.
One of those things was the art school in Adelaide and I took in a portfolio and thought
that would be a wonderful thing to do. And surprisingly, I ended up getting a scholarship to
go there for first year. And so that's what I went and did. And after the first year, probably during
that year, I just completely fell in love with it and just knew that that's what I wanted to do and
painting in particular. Shortly after graduating, I managed to get an exhibition with a gallery in
Melbourne. And at that time, my partner Justin, he got a phone call from friends in Melbourne.
Hey mate, come to Melbourne, we're starting a band. He's a bass player. And we kind of looked at each
other and went, Okay, why not?
After I think it was about three years in Melbourne me just really
really wanted a place where I could have a garden and ultimately that became the pull that brought
us back after we move back to Adelaide, after About a year we found this farm. And we came out
here one night as you do when you're looking at a place that you're going to buy, it was at that
magical time of day. And there was this really romantic wildness to the whole place. And I just
thought that each Is this the perfect backdrop to my future garden.
Initially, I didn't have the
studios working from a bedroom in the house, but looking out onto the landscape still through the
windows in a similar way to I am now and I think that almost subconsciously, the light and the
colours of the landscape around here started creeping back into the work and I don't actually
think that it was a deliberate or conscious thing. It was just more like an opening up of the palette
that occurred just because that's what I was looking at every day.
I do a little bit of
sketching but mainly I spend time out in the garden or looking out at it through the windows
but usually walking around in it And then I take that experience or the recollection of that
experience, I bring it back here into the studio and then I make the paintings from that. So they
end up being paintings that are about a recollection of an experience or a memory I
suppose you've got, you know, the breeze coming through the trees and the foliage. And then the
light obviously changes throughout the day and throughout the season.
Mum was always really interested in art and gardening. And she would take me to a lot of
gardens as well as a child, we would go and look at open gardens and she would take me around her
garden that she was making. And so when I was growing up, I learned the names of plants and
things as I was learning to talk, I suppose. But now when I reflect back on it I kind of think how
lucky I am because it's kind of shaped who I am today and and what my passions are.
I'm a gardener
who paints and for a long time I kept those things very separate in my life. You know, I had painting
and the studio and that was work. And then I had my garden and that was really my hobby and my
downtime. And over the past few years or perhaps as I've got older, I've started to realize that
they aren't really separate at all and they're both parts of the same thing.
As the seasons change here
and the seasons are quite pronounced in the Adelaide Hills we have very cold, wet,
bleak at times winters and hot baking extreme summers and that is reflected in the garden
obviously, these paintings behind me which are full of kind of warm browns and warm reds and
pinks and flowers, of course, I was painting in the middle of winter when there's no flowers.
outside and lots of modern kind of gray light and I started painting these richer colours. And I think
I just paint what I'm craving and paint what I want to see.
So now that the gardens reached a
certain level of maturity, it's now about 10 years old. What's interesting is that it's changed from
a very flower-filled garden into what is now a shade garden in a lot of the main areas.
And that's interesting for us to observe because it's what's starting to happen is it's creating its own
microclimate. As the hedges come up and the trees come up. The temperature is dropping, the tree
canopies are joining up, and the planting underneath is also behaving differently. But the
biggest thing we notice is the the lushness that's retained and the protection from a lot of the hot
weather in summer.
I think my main inspiration for the garden has actually online long been about trying to
recapture the magical atmosphere of that first evening when we came out here. And I wanted to
create a romantic, lush garden full of flowers with a romantic atmosphere. So it's been trial and
error. And I think that's what gardening is. I think it's this wonderful, creative, forgiving
exercise where you learn a lot along the way.
My favorite time of day in the garden is definitely the end of the day, at time just after
sunset as you go into the glow-ming. I love that word where the sun has set, but you've still got
that beautiful luminescent light and colours do really amazing weird things in that light and
it's really beautiful. And I spent a lot of time out in the garden at that time, because I've
usually finished work for the day, and I'll wander around
out there until Justin comes looking for me.