Vanessa Gardiner

Sea Cliffs

Saturday 12 May to Sunday 1 July 2018

Vanessa Gardiner’s exhibition will be in the Ground floor gallery at Sladers Yard. Simon Quadrat‘s paintings will show in the First floor gallery and Café at the same time.

Quarry Edge 25 acrylic on plywood 61 x 183 cm

Vanessa Gardiner’s most recent paintings explore her chosen places in Portland, Cornwall and Skye with relish and confidence.  The palpable pleasure of white cliffs against a turquoise sea off Portland or moody grey headlands projecting into dramatic shadowed Cornish coves makes each painting sing with the excitement that made her paint it. The dramatic lines and colour contrasts give immediate impact and yet these are the works of many months of radical repainting and subtle improvements. The more time one spends looking at these paintings, the more one sees in them.

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 as fresh and vital as the sea breeze.

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.

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.

If you would like a notification when Vanessa Gardiner’s new paintings are available to view online and buy please call Sladers Yard on 01308 459511 or email gallery@sladersyard.co.uk.

 

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