Adventures start where most of what is familiar ends - and for centuries Morocco has lured visitors from foreign shores to the North African trading hubs filled with mystique and an enthralling culture. Passing through the city gates, raised by the Almohad rulers in the eleventh century, a new world waits inside the fortified walls of Tangier, Fez or Marrakech. Seemingly endless narrow streets lead to enclosed bazaars, or souks, filled with loud haggling between traders and their customers trying to find an equilibrium for a deal whether it is spices, carpets or clothes. Away from the noise, the hot dry air and the dusty maze-like corridors awaits tranquillity. Small riads form interior oases within the walls of the beautifully decorated villas set in lush landscape gardens. Founded almost a thousand years ago by caliphs of a long-gone era, the Manera gardens and the many others sited around Marrakech still serve as places of solace.

The Majorelle Garden in Marrakech has been an important inspiration of Jonathan Purday for more than a decade. Established in the early twenties by the French Orientalist artist, Jacques Majorelle, the botanical garden was purposely meant to resemble the caliphal gardens, slowly expanding it to include several gardens spread over ten acres. The Cubist villa within the gardens completes the residential masterpiece. Today the garden is well-known in the city, notably reinvigorated in the sixties by the late fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent who spend a big part of his life in Marrakech. The Majorelle Garden with its bamboo, cacti, palm trees, fountains, pots and secluded patches, remain a centre point from which several of Purday’s paintings are influenced, and a place he regularly revisits.

Find a Better Place to Stay 4 positions the viewer at a pond in a peaceful corner on the grounds of Majorelle. Entirely surrounded by cacti and big leafy plants in large clay pots painted in the distinctive cobalt blue - known as ‘bleu-Majorelle’ - the opposite side of the calm water is observed through the plants in front of the viewer. In the background majestic palm trees hover tall above the garden, providing shade and cooler grounds for the potted plants. The flat surface of the water in the pond mirrors every detail above it, adding to the impression of being a small corner of paradise, spared from the harsh light and heat of the desert outside the city walls.

In other pieces, Purday slightly departs from the real-life representation of Majorelle Garden seen in Find a Better Place to Stay 4; a scenery so familiar that it is instantly recognisable to viewers who have been to Marrakech. Paintings such as Find a Better Place to Stay 7 and Trend Vacuum 30 are created from his own and found photos, collaged and worked through different studies in sketchbooks before the first brush strokes on the canvas.

The large architectural pool portrayed in Find a Better Place to Stay 7 has many similarities to the garden pond in the earlier piece. Observed from the far end, Purday again makes full use of the water surface to reiterate the plants and terracotta building surrounding it. An otherwise spacious pool in a Moroccan riad is cleverly filled with density and creates a cosy and secluded atmosphere.

The cactus reappears in many of the paintings not just as an exotic and resilient plant but as a cipher for timelessness, hinted in the series of works titled ‘Trend Vacuum’; a slightly ironic title for a continuous series of work that makes a sideways comment on way photos today are manicured and beautified to attract followers and boosting PR. Trend Vacuum 30 offers the ultimate perspective for eager snappers: a contemporary building with large open spaces and a narrow stream of water flowing through the building, leading to an undefined eternity. Except for the few cacti in the foreground, the empty space appears ghostly. A monument constructed not for living, and left to itself once the day turns into night.

As sculptural forms, the cacti in Crazy Geometry catch the light at different times of day, casting strong shadows or disrupting shafts of sunlight that stream through the geometric apertures. The tessellated triangular openings of an Arabic air-brick garden wall reveal the late afternoon sky over the city skyline. It is an in-between space of inside-outside, making it a landscape and interior and still life at the same time.

A continuous selection of paintings by Jonathan Purday have been presented by Eyestorm since the first introduction of the artist in 2010. The collaboration led to the exclusive print editions titled Meditation in Red and Canopy Memories; two screenprints inspired by short Japanese haiku poems known for their highly descriptive form and precise appeal to the readers senses.

You can find more information about the four paintings, and see them in further details, on Jonathan Purday’s artist page here.