“Odiham” by Leo Jahaan.
Oil on canvas, 2014.
120 cm x 160 cm.

“Odiham” is the name of a village in England in existence for at least 900 years.  This painting is based on an engraving that appeared in a book about traditional English garden design published in 1892.  In this painting you can see a small section of the overgrowth of plants that were covering a priest’s residence in Odiham.  In fact the author of the book felt very strongly about this type of garden, specifically “the too frequent presence of stupid work in landscape gardening”, preferring instead “the formal garden, with its insistence on strong bounding lines”.  One can only imagine how he would feel about this painting.