Vanessa Gardiner

DORSET SUMMER SHOW

14 May – 2 July 2022

Following her highly successful solo show, we are delighted to include a selection of Vanessa Gardiner’s paintings in our current show, a group exhibition of Dorset-based artists. All Vanessa’s available works are shown below.

A fully illustrated catalogue of Vanessa Gardiner’s most recent exhibition can be ordered now at £10 + £2 p&p within UK.

Vanessa Gardiner’s work is presented beautifully framed in white box frames. She works in acrylic on board or plywood and the drawings are in pencil on paper. Paintings on paper are marked as such in the captions below, all others are on board or plywood. For media and dates, or to see the picture full screen, please click on the image.

Paintings marked as Reserved can come free so please do let us know if you would like to be 2nd Reserve etc.

Beeny Cliff 18 17.5 x 65cm £1,950
Beeny Cliff 19 80 x 158cm £8,000
Cliff Wall 25 41 x 40cm £2,500
Cliff Wall 34 2020 25 x 35 cm £1,800
Field Edge 26 62 x 153cm £6,800
Godrevy Point 6 2017 acrylic on board 37 x 59cm £2,800
Godrevy Point 29 99 x 51cm £5,000
Gull Rock 19 2021 acrylic on paper laid on board 51 x 66cm £3,500
Gull Rock 20 87 x 160cm £8,500
Harbour 2020 acrylic on board 20 x 25cm £1,300
Harbour 10 37 x 61cm £2,800
Harbour Coast 32 27 x 61cm £2,500
Harbour Entrance 4 30 x 30cm £1,800
Headlands 4 93 x 183cm £9,500
Headlands 10 61 x 123cm £5,800
Headlands 12 49 x 76cm £4,200
Quarry Edge 14 (Portland) 37 x 90cm £3,800
Two Headlands 35 x 106cm £4,200
Two Headlands 3 73 x 111cm £5,200
Vertical Coast 10 60 x 38cm £2,800
Vertical Coast 14 72 x 34cm £2,950
Wave Line 7 21 x 31cm £1,500
Beeny Cliff drawing 3 pencil on paper 21 x 73cm £950
Beeny Cliff drawing 4 pencil on paper 26.5 x 82cm £1,200
Fields and Sea (Pentargon Cliffs) pencil on paper 12 x 28cm £500
Harbour drawing pencil on paper 14 x 18cm £500
Headlands study drawing 29 x 83cm £1,200
Headlands drawing 3 29 x 83cm £1,200
Sea Wall (Trevalga) drawing 29 x 41cm £750

‘Distinct landscapes around the Cornish coast have been long-standing sources of inspiration for my own work. Such places as Pentargon, Beeny, Trevalga and Godrevy; and at Boscastle, where the natural crook of the harbour is almost enclosed by the architectural forms of the dark slate cliffs and inlets of deep turquoise sea. All are beautiful, dramatically contorted coastlines, each shaped and weathered in common by the Atlantic Ocean.’ – Vanessa Gardiner

Clean lines, dynamic surfaces and thrilling coastal subject matter combine in Vanessa Gardiner’s distinctive paintings. The precipitous cliffland around Boscastle on the North Cornwall coast draws her back to experience again and again the excitement of its dramatic chasms and wild headlands. It is country she has known and loved since childhood and her response is both immediate and rich with memories. The shadowed cliffs rise, stratified and architectural, above turquoise seas rimmed with crashing white surf. Vanessa Gardiner honours these natural places with a precise veracity that keeps her work fresh.

The cliffs that fascinate her are fine-ground foliated black slate that towers above the sea west from Beeny Cliff and separately at Godrevy Point near St Ives. New viewpoints enter her repertoire in this exhibition. A boat trip gave rise to the long thin Coastal paintings looking back at the cliffs from the sea. Tintagel makes its entrance and beyond that, Gull Rock, a great flank of slate shooting down into the sea. The white stone of Portland gives a good contrast in Quarry Edge 14.

Vanessa Gardiner’s practice is one of layering. Paint is applied, thin and translucent or thicker and opaque, and in places, echoing the process of erosion, it is scoured and sanded, reapplied, rinsed and scrubbed back until gradually, layer by layer, a patina emerges that may partially reveal its past. Her paintings are worked like pebbles on the beach. Lines are scored, straight or curving, to delineate and divide the thresholds and contours, columns and ledges. Like the sea, her washing and rubbing is a kind of cleaning and purification. As time passes Vanessa’s work gently questions, probes and perfects, looking always to catch that thrill, the true nature of the feeling of the place.

Vanessa Gardiner is a much-loved painter who has been working as a professional artist for many years. She trained at Oxford Polytechnic and the Central School of Art and Design in London. Her work is in private collections around the world and in public collections including Exeter Hospital, Bournemouth University Collection, Carlow Collection Ireland, the Archive of the Ballinglen Arts Foundation Co. Mayo, Cowley Manor, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Fidelity International, New Hall Cambridge, Magdalen College Oxford, the British Academy London and the British School in Athens. She lives in Charmouth, Dorset, with the painter Alex Lowery. They have a daughter, Jessie.

Her solo shows at Sladers Yard were in 2008, 2012 and 2016 with two two-man shows in 2019 and Cliffland in 2022.

Press about Vanessa Gardiner: