Morgan Allender (Aquarius, 1982) is a contemporary artist-gardener based in Southern Australia. Known for her gorgeous, large-scale garden paintings, she blurs the boundaries between landscape and still life. Her five acre garden at Shepherd’s Rest serves as an endless source of inspiration, as she paints in a converted barn studio surrounded by nature, seasonal color, and light.
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Developing Her Signature Style
Morgan Allender grew up in Southern Australia and inherited her mother’s love of art and gardening. This sense of nostalgia, captured by golden light, runs through all of her work. She left home to attend the Adelaide arts school, and quickly fell in love with the earthy materiality of painting.
It was not until she began her studio practice, after art school, that she began to discover her own artistic voice, through the process of daily painting and a lot of hard work. She describes her painting style as having evolved out of itself, from one season and series of paintings to the next, much like the maturation of a garden.
Soon after art school she was given the opportunity to exhibit her paintings in Melbourne and moved there with her partner, to start the life of a painter.
“There is something about this untamable quality of paint that is akin to gardening and working with the elements – it’s a collaboration between the human hand and those elements that are out of our control.”
-Morgan Allender
The Garden At Shepherd's Rest
In 2010, Morgan started to crave a place with her own land and garden. She and her partner found an 1850s stone shepherd’s cottage in the Adelaide Hills, with excellent soil for gardening and room for a studio.
They have spent the past 13 years slowly renovating the land and buildings and creating a garden from scratch. With light as her guiding muse, she chose a palette of grasses and romantic perennials that accentuate the evening glow and hilltop breeze.
In warmer months, the garden overflows with the romantic flowers seen on her canvases – roses, iris, daisies, grasses, plumbago, poppies, lamb’s ear, evening primrose, and flowering annuals in pastel shades.
“I feel most authentically myself when I am either in a garden, or my studio, usually solitary and connected to creativity and nature.”
-Morgan Allender
Lifestyle of a Garden Painter
Morgan’s studio is situated in a converted barn in the midst of her 5 acre garden, surrounded by plants, color, and the elements. The parallels between the creative process and the seasonality of gardening are Morgan’s greatest source of inspiration.
The time she spends walking about her garden translate onto her canvases, not as direct representational depictions, but more as garden memories, that exude an ephemeral sense of place.
Her paintings blur the boundaries between landscape and still life, creating a category of their own. Through her garden paintings she captures a sense of beautiful longing, through place, time, and memory.
“I realized over the last couple of years that there is really no divide between the painting and the gardening, they are two media within the same art practice.”
-Morgan Allender
Garden Paintings By Morgan Allender
