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More than fifty times between May and July 1888, Vincent van Gogh climbed up the rocky outcrop of Montmajour, overlooking the plain of La Crau, three miles to the north of Arles, in southern France. There, in the wild garden surrounding the ruins of a 12th century abbey, he produced a series of six drawings; reed pen-marks boldly overlapping, offering close-ups of wild grasses, curving pines, and rocks, contrasting with sudden openings onto the plain below, its fields stretching into the horizon.

Ellen Altfest’s Borrowed View (2022-23) was painted over many seasons on a plot of land belonging to her in-laws in Rising Fawn, Georgia. It was made following a three-month residency in Kyoto, Japan, during which time she painted a single patch of sugigoke moss in the garden of Enrian temple, working from 6:30 in the morning until dusk. On her return home, she set about to make a painting that she wished would be pleasurable to the Japanese sense of aesthetics and encapsulate life at its peak: lush, green, life affirming.

Van Gogh was very much taken by Japanese art—particularly the ukiyo-e colour woodblock prints that he collected with his brother Theo—from which he gained the use of the crop and the opposition between close-ups and receding perspectives. He would have understood and shared Altfest’s attraction to the principle of Shakkei, ‘borrow scenery,’ an ancient garden design technique whereby a distant view, such as a mountain, is incorporated or ‘borrowed’ into the composition of a garden, becoming a continuous part of the garden itself.

The analogy between Vincent and Ellen—at first glance, the unruly and tormented Dutchman toiling in Arles and the thoughtful and contemplative American painstakingly observing nature in Connecticut and Georgia—might seem odd at first, but it would be misunderstanding the fundamental nature of their practice. Van Gogh’s work too is imbued with a profound sensibility for the motif in front of him, the result of meticulous observation; while Altfest’s, under the veneer of realism, and a quiet and meditative approach, offers a depth and power that transcends the simple depiction of what lies before her. Both too are endlessly fascinated by nature – not at its most grandiose, sublime or picturesque, but in its simplest, most fundamental incarnation—and by gardens. And while their compositions might at first appear incidental, they are anything but.