vanessa gardiner - the process of landscape

Vanessa Gardiner lives and works in Chartmouth, Dorset

Hart Gallery, London
Sladers Yard Gallery, West Bay

Vanessa Gardiner is a painter who is captivated both by the beauty of the landscapes on which her work is based and by the processes involved during the making of the pictures. 

“In a sense for me they go hand-in-hand: the immediacy of drawing directly from the seemingly haphazard natural subject matter with the careful selection and ordering of the compositions back in the studio.” Vanessa Gardiner, 2008.

Concentrating on the singular coastlines around north Cornwall and more recently Co Mayo in Ireland, she has become increasingly aware of the connecting elements found within these landscapes.   Recent trips to both Egypt and Athens have also focused her interest in the geometry of architecture and its relationship with both the landscape and the visual language she uses within her work.
The processes involved in making the paintings are significant: she works in acrylic on board which gives her the freedom to change the composition of a painting if necessary by cutting it down and not restricting the work to a prescribed format.  Frequently she re-draws the image, scouring and sanding back the paint until the surface becomes abraded and enlivened, taking on a beautiful patina and revealing qualities of its own.

It is this physical process, together with the rational ordering of the image in her mind which enthralls her - the linearity of the graphite with the rubbed paint surfaces and the unexpected results which may then occur.

Vanessa Gardiner - Sladers Yard
19 July 14 September 2008

We are very pleased and proud to welcome Vanessa Gardiner to Sladers Yard.
Her exhilarating landscapes of sea and rock are abstract in the most accessible way. The beautiful places that inspire her are recognisable, only more so because she has translated them into a human experience with her art. A subtle and inventive colourist with a strong individual aesthetic, she has found a sure touch producing painting after painting of exceptional quality and appeal. Her clarity and freshness of touch leave the viewer invigorated and thirsty for more.

Vanessa works in acrylic on board which she scrubs and abrades with wire wool and sandpaper, building up layers of colour and cutting them back creating endlessly fascinating surfaces. At times she saws up the boards, reassembling them like a jigsaw puzzle, the joins becoming a vital part of the composition, creating her own order out of nature. She is fascinated by architecture and has spent some time painting ancient Egyptian monuments against brilliant blue skies. Her work could be said to create architecture from the natural rocky coastlines which inspire her.

The dramatic beauty of Boscastle, on the north Cornish coast, has been her source for many wonderful paintings, the newer ones refined to a sophisticated purity. As a child she visited there many times. Her father, Patrick Gardiner, was an Oxford philosopher who like her mother adored art and poetry. The family explored Britain and Europe, visiting churches and exhibitions creating a foundation of knowledge and memory which Vanessa draws on in many different ways in her work. In 2007 she took up a residency in County Mayo in Ireland which has resulted in new paintings of softer landforms in gorgeous acid greens and blacks against rich blue seas. The show will also include new work based in Portland.

From a combined English love of picturesque scenery, an appreciation of the more severe, anti-picturesque, architected forms favoured by French and British artists in the early 20th century and of the abstracted landscapes of the 1950s, Vanessa Gardiner has opened up a new vein in an old tradition. She has now refined her ideas to a level of high sophistication. Judith Bumpus, 2005

Vanessa studied art at the Central School of Art and has exhibited seriously since 1991. She is represented in London by the Hart Gallery. She lives and works in Charmouth in west Dorset with her partner, the painter Alex Lowery, and their daughter Jessie.