Vanessa Gardiner

Igniting Sight

new paintings by Fred Cuming RA, Luke Elwes, Vanessa Gardiner, Frances Hatch  Janette Kerr PPRWA RSA Hon  Alex Lowery ceramics by Richard Batterham and furniture by Petter Southall

Saturday 6 July until Sunday 8 September 2019

This summer, while JMW Turner’s painting, ‘Bridport, Dorsetshire,’ is showing at Bridport Museum, we celebrate Turner in Bridport by exploring the ways in which his influence lives on in contemporary landscape painting, particularly in the work of six artists, all of whom to some extent belong in the great descriptive English Romantic tradition which began with Turner’s truly great paintings.

Vanessa Gardiner’s new work can be seen below and is available to reserve or buy now. Please contact us on gallery@sladersyard.co.uk or telephone: 01308 459511 to enquire about any of Vanessa Gardiner’s work. Please click on an image to see the details and price. Any problems please contact the gallery.

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  Vertical Coast 12 122 x 80 cm

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  Cliff Line 93 x 48 cm

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  Godrevy Point 17 58 x 58 cm

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  Trevalga 12 58 x 58 cm

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  Pentargon 6 42 x 29 cm

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  Cliff Wall 25 41 x 40 cm

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  Pentargon 2 30 x 30 cm

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  Wave Line 11 26 x 28 cm

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  Sea Cliff 8 12 x 41 cm

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  SOLD Godrevy Point 35 12 x 32cm

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  Pentargon 7 56 x 87 cm

Vanessa Gardiner writes: In my parents’ house I remember there used to hang two small colour-tinted etchings of Cornwall, made after Turner’s watercolours. Both were exquisitely observed: one of Boscastle harbour and the other a waterfall at Beeny, nearby.  The precipitous cliffs were depicted in an exaggeratedly high manner, emphasising the wild theatricality and grandness of the landscape.

Cliff Wall 25 41 x 40 cm

Turner had a strong connection with Cornwall, drawn by its dramatic coastal scenery and the clarity of the light; he worked his way around the whole of the peninsula sketching the places which interested him.

These same 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 paints in a dynamic geometric style enlivened further with lyrical curving lines of hills and pathways. Her colours may be opaque and crisp or more translucent and weathered, scoured and scored, washed back and reapplied, to give surfaces like those of a pebble on the beach. Seductive in colour, texture and composition, these paintings are deepened and intensified by memory. They explore what is known and felt when experiencing the raw beauty of the place. Gardiner’s discipline is always to stay true to the landscape as she sees it which keeps her work fresh and vital.

Vanessa Gardiner is a well-established painter who has been working as a professional artist for many years. She was born in 1960 in Oxford where her father was a tutor of philosophy at Magdalen College. She did her Foundation year at Oxford Polytechnic going on to study Fine Art at the Central School of Art and Design in London. After six major solo shows at the Hart Gallery in London, she had her first solo show at the Thackeray Gallery in 2015. She has had three previous solo shows filling Sladers Yard in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

Godrevy Point 17
58 x 58 cm acrylic on board, framed

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.

Vanessa Gardiner’s new work can be seen below. Please click on any image to see them all in larger format. To enquire about Vanessa’s paintings please call Sladers Yard on 01308 459511 or email gallery@sladersyard.co.uk 

Press about Vanessa Gardiner:

To read Vanessa Gardiner’s Talk from Friday 14 September 2012 click here: Talk