No Watering

As a gardener, Astrid Preston is a realist: Her Santa Monica yard is too steep for hedges and too small for all the trees she wants. But as a painter, she has everything: giant boxwood mazes, cypress tickling the sky and exotic plants of her own invention. She can mix up the seasons (pairing spring blooms with the burnt fields of late summer) and weather (conjuring fog over sunny clearings). She can even paint landscapes within landscapes.

“A garden itself is a stylized, controlled version of nature,” she explains. “Like painting, it grows out of the imagination. But its limitations are very real.” Preston paints gardens because “they’re full of metaphors for our emotions and thoughts.” A winding path, for instance, becomes a symbol for life’s journey. Mazes represent both the human urge to control nature and the fear of getting lost in it.

Born in Sweden, Preston moved to Los Angeles when she was 6 and remembers always feeling the creative pull of art and landscape. Her painting and gardening feed each other: The terraced hills on her canvases came directly from her hillside yard. And when she began painting apples in 1990, she suddenly had to have an apple tree. “I paint to understand what I feel,” she says. “And then I want to see what I’ve painted in my garden.”

Formal elements--garden stairways, patterned hedges, clipped topiary balls--surface often in her rich oil paintings. Such details, sometimes set against a wilder scene, imply a human presence and balance her compositions. If this is easier with a brush than on her hillside, her experiments with color are more unbridled outdoors, where she mixes coral salvia with blue hibiscus, yellow abutilons and roses.

To Preston, the fun of gardening is constructing an imaginative portrait of nature. “Here, on the edge of the desert, we can almost do anything we want.” Of course, she adds, she can’t grow peonies, her favorite flower, and there’s only so much space for fruit trees. But what she can’t grow she can paint and, for her, that’s the ultimate satisfaction. “Our deepest feelings are reflected in nature. Look at the power of a tree. It doesn’t just nurture, it expresses us.”

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Astrid Preston’s recent landscape paintings will be on view through Feb. 8 at the Peter Blake Gallery, 326 N. Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach.