Brief Garden, 1936

Here, Maya is reenacting my previous life as a gardener at the Bevis Bawa “Brief Garden” in Sri Lanka in the 1930s. Bevis Bawa and his brother and creative rival Geoffrey Bawa loom extremely large in Sri Lankan culture. They were literally very tall men, of mixed ethnicity, wealthy, queer, and visionaries. In this painting I wanted to use scale to make the gardener 100x larger than Bevis, which would be seen as a radical way to depict anyone of his stature in history. In the distance you can see Mr. Bawa being served a drink by his butler while in the foreground, Maya is tempted by foreboding red berries while picking up Bevis’s cigarettes. Eating red could be good, could be dead is a (not very helpful) English phrase gardeners use to remember which berries may be poisonous. The idea for this came from memories of walks with my father who would always try questionable looking berries straight off of bushes in the neighborhood. He’s a plant person and worked in tea research in Sri Lanka so this seemed natural to him but it would scare my mother and I.