Garden with Pines 1975

Patrick Caulfield made ‘Garden with Pines’ using screen printing, and you can really see how he embraced that process. There’s a wonderful flatness to this image, the way he’s taken the chaos of a garden and reduced it to these bold, graphic shapes. I love the black outlines, they’re so confident and unwavering. Look at how they define the tangle of branches and the sharp edges of the architectural elements. Then you have the expanses of flat color, a kind of simplified shorthand for the textures of nature. The speckled surface of the block is particularly interesting against the smooth planes of color elsewhere. It's like he’s saying, ‘here’s a little bit of visual noise to keep you on your toes’. Caulfield’s work reminds me a bit of David Hockney, especially in the way they both play with perspective and flatten space. But Caulfield has a harsher, almost industrial edge. Ultimately it’s a really interesting take on how we see and process the world around us, turning it into something both familiar and strangely artificial.