Jeremy Gardiner

Jeremy Gardiner is a modern artist based in the UK focused mainly on painting landscapes with an abstract, whimsical twist. Google image search “Jeremy Gardiner” and you'll get idea of what I mean. His pieces don't immediately appear to be landscapes; it was only upon reading several painting titles (for example"Ballard Point No.11," "St Aldhelm's Head," and "Seatown Looking Towards Golden Cap") that I realized what exactly I was looking at.

Gardiner was born on April 26, 1957, in Munster, Germany to British parents. Gardiner dates the start of his career as an artist to his eleventh birthday, when he won a Brooke Bond National Schools’ Award for Art. The piece he submitted for this contest was a painting of a red combine harvester in a field of wheat. His love of landscapes grew as he visited his grandmother in Swanage, where Gardiner admired the town’s bays, harbors, and arcthitectural features. After graduating from Newcastle University in 1979, Gardiner had his first solo exhibition at the Elizabethan Parnham House at Beaminster. From that point on, Gardiner has grown into a more accomplished artist and completed collaborative projects with other artists including Jem Maine of the Poole Study Gallery, Amanda Wallwork of Sherborne House Arts, and Julie Herring of the Atrium Gallery.

Gardiner's pieces play into the idea that different people see the same place differently, with different purposes and meanings. People never appear in his pictures, though he will use boats or other architectural pieces as indicators of scale. The majority of his paintings are acrylic paints on wood panels, though he has been known to incorporate other materials into his work (i.e. using driftwood in his series of paintings studying Ballard Point). After extensive research into the landscape he's interested in recreating, Gardiner uses different tools to shape the wood in such a way as to allow the paint to pool in a unique way or to mimic jagged rock edges. This mixture of abstract interpretations of landscapes mixed with unique texturing styles create a very jarring and intriguing look that I find quite interesting. I particularly like that he takes the classic landscape, which is usually quite soft and beautiful, and turned it into something much more modern and relevant. 

Clavell Tower, Kimmeredge

Summer Storm and Sunlight, Old Harry

Lighthouse, Anvil Point

Picture Sources:
Gardiner, Jeremy. Jeremy Gardiner. N.d. Paisnel Gallery, London. Web. 06 Oct. 2013. <http://www.paisnelgallery.com/pages/thumbnails/687.html>.

Information Source:

Collins, Ian, and Jeremy Gardiner. The Art of Jeremy Gardiner: Unfolding Landscape. Farnham, Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2013. Print.