Currently I’m organising a crowdfunding to expand De Schildertuin and to create a workshop program. Check it out here!
De Schildertuin is a biodiverse and sustainable garden in which I grow plants to make natural dyes and paints with. Flowers, roots, leafs, stems, most things can be used! It is a place for research on natural and sustainable painting materials.
In these blogposts, I regularly share updates on De Schildertuin.
Imagine walking with me and a small group of others through a biodiverse garden, part of which is also designed as a food forest…
That is where, after years of painting large, expansive landscapes, I finally felt a connection with the Dutch landscape—full of stories, life, and details. And that makes sense! From growing up on a farm, helping in my father’s vegetable garden and making pigment from its soil, to hiking in the mountains and taking conservation lessons, to working in a professional kitchen and seeing just how much plants have to offer, even in a single fine dining dish. Plants and nature have always played an important role in my life.
Ultimately, in that biodiverse garden, the word “dye plants” came up. That was the moment I joyfully realized that within my artistic practice I can also garden, use plants, have soil on my hands and knees, and work with fresh ingredients.
Everything comes together—not on a plate, but in a painting. Together with nature and all kinds of plants, I make paint, painting surfaces, and frames. In other words: a painting. It is the most beautiful thing there is!
The project
De Schildertuin is a large project that tells a big, important story. It addresses the urgent social issue of using circular and natural materials. It is also about how we as humans interact with nature, and how we can collaborate with her.
De Schildertuin is located in Rijswijk (Gelderland), in a biodiverse area with a “fairytale forest”—a rewilded high-stem orchard—, a vegetable garden, an orchard with sheep, a nut forest, and a fairly young food forest.
So what does De Schildertuin offer?
- pigment from dye plants and soil, to make inks or any type of paint, just like the old masters did!
- clay for red-firing ceramics, directly from the clay soil on which the garden lies.
- linen. This is made from flax: a sustainable crop that thrives in the Dutch climate.
Besides the material research I can do in the Painting Garden with plants and soil, there are also plants on the rest of the land that I can use. And there is so much beauty to see that I am doing a visual research project here as well. It is wonderful to draw and paint here, using materials from the garden. This makes it a research project together with, and about, Dutch nature.
Within this project I grow almost all the materials I use in my making process myself, so I can be sure where they come from, that they are grown sustainably, and that they have been part of a biodiverse system—one that welcomes birds, hares, deer, bees, and worms.
Workshops
I will be sharing the knowledge I gain during this (visual) research, in workshops and guided tours. This way I hope to create awareness about our relationship with nature, and about everything involved in turning a plant into a product.
The tours will include walks through the food forest. The workshops will take place in De Schildertuin, and there will be different types of workshops to participate in, all related to the plants growing there.
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Maud Konings 