Taking Vertical Gardens to a Whole New Level

Gaetano Pesce designed and built the plant-clad Organic Building in Japan which was completed in 1993.

The exterior is covered with steel-encased concrete panels glazed with a red finish that feature 'extruding pockets'. Inside these 'pockets' are fibreglass planters that contain more than 80 types of indigenous plants and trees selected in collaboration with Osaka horticulturists which are all irrigated via a computer-controlled hydrating system of mechanical pipes.

The red exterior is also in direct contrast to the surrounding neighbourhood grey uniformity.

Personally I find this design really interesting as it is different to a standard vertical garden where the plant boxes aren't seen. The Organic Building looks like a building with pot plants stuck along the walls making it quirky and fun and more importantly, environmentally friendly.

Expressionism

After going to the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces: European Masters and seeing all the paintings, it made me want to get back into painting. I hadn't painted anything since VCE which was about 4 years ago and was never a good painter to begin with but I've always loved the way people can express themselves through the medium of paint and that there is no wrong or right with art.

I thought I'd start small with a small canvas and some basic acrylic colour paints. I've always wanted to do a splatter painting (preferably on a large scale but due to lack of space, I settled for a small canvas).

I began experimenting with different techniques on a piece of newspaper just to get a sense of how things would turn out. I tried to flick paint off a toothbrush and off a paintbrush. I also tried to flick paint off a spoon. These all gave me very small splatters and I wanted to vary the sizes of the splatters so I literally filled up a spoon with blue paint, watered it down with water and flung it at the canvas in one splat. It came up beautifully so I continued doing this with red then yellow, flinging them in different directions and from different heights to get a variation of shapes and sizes.

on the left newspaper you can see the initial testing stage

After I had the main splatters down I finished off the painting by flicking blue, red, yellow and green paint over the top using a paintbrush. This gave me the speckled effect over the top.

I'm really happy with how this painting turned out. I love the layering of paint and seeing the paths of travel from the way the paint has hit the canvas.


This exercise was not just a physical painting but more of an emotional way for me to get creative and see what I could produce.

One day I would love to have a giant canvas and literally throw paint tins at it but that's for another rainy day....