Gardiner
nigel soper | book design
2014 1
The Art of
Jeremy Gardiner
In the Beginning Deep Mining in Dorset Ian Collins
Unfolding Landscape
Detail of plate 15, Moonlight, St Aldhelm’s Head to Gad Cliff, 2009
On a brilliant mid-summer morning, Jeremy Gardiner and I are basking in vast vistas of coastal Dorset – and then
Soon our feet are sticking to damp clay, for seams of useful stone (best of all the Purbeck Marble, descending in
descending, candles in hand, into a deep, dark hole. Treleven Haysom (the tenth generation of his family to mine and trade Purbeck stone) is leading us down a Victorian working quarry, which is now partly a museum.
bands of blue, green and grey) are separated by dirt, which must be dug out and carted away to release nature’s bounty. I for one suffer from claustrophobia, and have just been spooked by mental images of entombed miners –
Gardiner has an exhibition of pictures in a new showroom for the quarry’s stones and their various dressings. The strangely compelling relief abstractions – both airy and excavatory – suit their surroundings, and all
though now all my attention is taken in watching my step in guttering candlelight. Luckily this shaft is six-feet high, which is voluminous by the standards of old Dorset quarries. But, for guide, artist and author, that still raises
the more so since they seem to have been wrought on
the spectre of scalpings from sharp overhead projections. And then, suddenly, I am close to collision with what seems to be a star clinging to the ceiling. Or is this an antique mason’s symbol of a starfish, chipped into light relief like well-crafted graffiti? It is in fact the footprint cast of an iguanodon – a pre-historic monster weighing up to
layered, fractured and splintered panels of slate. Already from the car park we have seen great blocks of Purbeck Marble with striated marks where wedges were used to
The Art of
break off plinths for medieval churches and cathedrals.
Jeremy Gardiner
Other boulders strewn in the yard are edged with stalactite-like structures, as if culled from underground caverns. And many hunks of rock hold tiny shells which,
Unfolding Landscape
after countless millennia of tidal mayhem, will shortly make whorled decorations in smooth domestic surfaces.
Ian Collins Peter Davies Simon Martin Christiana Payne William Varley
I take a last look at the sea, glittering azure and turquoise, and at the bright white flank of Ballard Down –
Ian Collins, Peter Davies, Simon Martin, Christiana Payne, William Varley
now aware that chalk is composed of zillions of minute scales and shells called Coccoliths. How amazing to think that stones once lived.
LUND HUMPHRIES
three tonnes, extending maybe 10 metres and squelching through a swamp towards Swanage 140 million years ago, give or take a few million. Struck mute by the thought of that creature of awesome age and aspect towering above our twenty-first century heads, I experience the seismic shock that early nineteenth-century fossil discoveries in Dorset had on established thought, as fabulous beasts unknown to the Garden of Eden were found to have flourished and vanished. Those old bones
9
Jeremy Gardiner: Unfolding Landscape by Ian Collins, Peter Davies, Simon Martin, Christiana Payne and William Varley Lund Humphries 2012 270 × 249mm 160pp
24. Old Harry, 1996 Acrylic on birch panel 46 x 61 cm (18 x 24 in) Private collection
24
he first of its kind, this monograph provides a comprehensive assessment of Jeremy Gardiner’s career. He has taken the exploratory landscape vision of St Ives Modernists like Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and John Tunnard, into a new era. The artist’s unique geological interpretation of landscape not only describes the current lie of the land but portrays it as a complex outcome of natural processes over vast periods of time. Using for his inspiration the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, the rugged Atlantic coast of Cornwall and the volcanic regions of the Lake District and parts of Brazil these form his core subject matter. The work was shown at King’s Place at the end of 2012.
| jeremy gardiner
T
| in the beginning
25
30
seventeenth-century stone front of London’s Mercers Hall, and a clock tower (minus clock) from London Bridge was
one of the artist’s favourite pre-war Shell posters, by Graham Sutherland (1903–80). Here a quote from Pascal
set to guard the harbour. Burt incorporated columns from Waterloo Bridge and Billingsgate Market, statues from the Royal Exchange, and a Hyde Park Corner archway into his
seems to have been absorbed into Gardiner’s quest and art: ‘Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.’ Back in England, and on a typically resourceful
house and garden, before building himself a castle overlooking Durlston Head. There he planned an idyllic community, but no one wanted to join him. Today a cliff-
detective trail, Gardiner wanted to see Swanage through Paul Nash’s eyes, so in 1992 he rented his hero’s former home at 2 The Parade – a first-floor flat on the sea front.
walk past Tilly Whim Caves (plate 25) – a former quarry now closed to visitors, but once a source of wonderment
He painted on the balcony and indoors, looking from shadow into light and from an enclosed space to a huge
to the young Gardiner – leads to an immense Portlandstone globe surrounded by improving inscriptions, which is the most surreal sight of all (plate 26), and the subject of
expanse of sea and sky. The resulting Ballard Point pictures (plates 27–33) – exhibited in 2000 in London, New York and also on Swanage pier – pay homage to
61. Orcombe Point to Beer, 2009 Acrylic and Jesmonite on poplar panel 60 x 119 cm (23½ x 47 in) Private collection
| in the beginning
31
| making it new
65
| beyond st ives
71
62. Night, Dancing Ledge, 2009 Acrylic and Jesmonite on poplar panel 60 x 119 cm (23½ x 47 in)
were disseminated by Gardiner at MIT, but he also realised that these exploratory exercises had to be continually and intelligently renewed lest the course become stale and formulaic. He knew that projects had to be adapted to particular contexts. Working with an ‘elective’ group of (mainly science) students, he supervised the creation of a giant vector line drawing, using stakes and discarded reels of magnetic tape. It was inspired by Nazca line drawings, and as the MIT weekly newspaper pointed out, it required a ‘God’s eye view’13 to see it properly. Ever alert to the potential of new technologies, whilst at MIT Gardiner also experimented with digital imaging using a precursor of the Quantel paint box, as well as working with pioneering electronic prepress technologies. In addition to this he continued to develop his painting in a studio in Pearl Street, on the Bayfront in downtown Boston (plate 63). In 1985 he had a highly successful exhibition at Boston University; when he moved to New York he obtained a teaching post at the renowned Pratt Institute of Art and Design on the strength of it. Since the late 1930s Pratt Institute had its own version of the Bauhaus vorlehre, but under the leadership of the Mexican artist, Isaac Kerlow, Gardiner helped introduce new technologies and time-based media into the traditional curriculum. The New York art scene in the early 1980s was extraordinarily energetic and diverse. In the galleries the spectrum ran from Keith Haring (1958–90) to Donald Judd (1928–94), but the principal change lay in the reemergence of figuration. During the years dominated by Clement Greenberg’s (1909–94) absolutism, an abstract painter who introduced figurative elements would be
62
25. Tilly Whim Caves, 2009 Acrylic and Jesmonite on poplar panel 61 x 61 cm (24 x 24 in) Courtesy of Paisnel Gallery
| jeremy gardiner
considered morally suspect. With the decline of Greenberg’s hegemony, everything seemed possible. It was into this heady atmosphere that Gardiner brought the Brazilian photographer Veronica Falcão, who was later to become his wife. They had met at MIT’s Visible Language Workshop. As a Fulbright Scholar studying documentary film under Professor Richard Leacock, she was consolidating her experience of dance photography at the Municipal Theatre in Rio. Interestingly, their first meeting was in the darkroom of the celebrated American photographer Minor White, where she collaborated with Gardiner to produce gum bichromate prints. Not surprisingly, she was crucial too in his subsequent activity in Brazil, not only in organising a studio for him on Copacabana beach but also in making A Painter’s Palette, a short film of his painting expedition to the volcanic archipelago of Fernando de Noronha. During the late 1980s Gardiner exhibited in Brazil, and then in 1992 had sabbatical leave from Pratt Institute, moving back to London and teaching printmaking at the RCA. Returning to America in 1993, he moved to the New World School of the Arts in Miami where he introduced new digital technologies just as he had in New York. Whilst in America he made regular transatlantic trips to acquire working material for his Dorset paintings. The loyalty to the sites of his childhood adventures was, I suspect, reinforced by his admiration for the Polish artist Piotr Potworowski (1898–1962).
| jeremy gardiner
| making it new
63
64
| jeremy gardiner
3 Beyond St Ives
Gardiner’s mix of anthropomorphic and post-industrial
A New Landscape Vision
imagery, processed both through the traditional and high tech modes of plein air drawing and digital imaging respectively, gives his work a contemporary pertinence. Whereas many post-war artists (particularly Victor Pasmore’s (1908–98) group highlighted in the critic
Peter Davies
65. Sandymouth, 2007 Acrylic and Jesmonite on handmade paper 54 x 18 cm (21¼ x 71⁄ 8 in) Private collection
Lawrence Alloway’s book Nine Abstract Artists2 in 1954) sought analytic or mathematical blueprints for natural form and structure, informed by books like Wentworth D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form3 and Jay Hambidge’s Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by the Artists4, Gardiner has chosen for his intellectual Detail of plate 77, Spring, Zennor Head, 2010
Jeremy Gardiner’s identity as a searchingly inventive landscape painter is not limited to work made in
challenging and geomorphically varied set of subjects, but with the daunting weight of artistic precedence
response to those spectacular stretches of coastline – Dorset’s Jurassic Coast and Cornwall’s West Penwith peninsula – that have perhaps moved him more than any
centred on the celebrated art colony of St Ives. Gardiner’s place in the influential, not to say popular, modern movement in Cornwall is inevitably predicated
other. Other landscapes, well-removed from the favoured West Country, have provided important, if ancillary,
on his being a visiting, rather than domiciled, ‘arriviste’, an almost post-modern interpreter of a well-established
alternatives for his compounded topographic, archaeological and geomorphological vision. Similarly, the appropriation of the taut, textural and abraded landscape style of the St Ives school artists like Ben Nicholson (1894–1982), Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004),
mid-century landscape abstraction. Though perhaps the most ambitious among his peers, Gardiner is certainly not alone in taking forward the essential achievements of the modernising St Ives landscape artists. In recent years, younger artists have
Peter Lanyon (1918–64), Alexander Mackenzie (1923– 2002) and John Wells (1907–2000), important though their influences have been, has been complemented, indeed expanded, by exposure to the conceptual rigours and hard-headed formalism of American art, made
subjected the romanticism of mystically or scientifically inspired imagery to an analytic formalism drawn from diverse modern movements like cubism, constructivism and expressionism or – where the inimitable Lizard-based John Tunnard (1900–71) was concerned – surrealism.
available to him through his distinguished 14-year teaching career in the US. Where Cornwall is concerned, this vital and intelligent artist who has focused on the twisting and undulating coastline – as in Sandymouth (plate 65),
Gardiner has therefore alighted, perhaps uniquely, on a hybrid style informed as much by American formalism as by the pastoralism of the English ‘school’. The critic Charles Darwent therefore aptly concludes that ‘Jeremy Gardiner’s art recognises that modernity is cumulative,
based on the wild, windy Atlantic edge, and Lighthouse, The Lizard (plate 66) based on the less exposed
that newness is built upon oldness’.1 The uncanny interface between the new and the old is a timely feature of much millennium-period art, and
southern shores – has had to contend not only with a
framework sources that have been more purely relevant to geology and landscape. William Buckland’s Geology and Mineralogy,5 Richard Fortey’s The Hidden Landscape: Journey into the Geological Past,6 and The Earth7 have been of prime significance to Gardiner’s thinking about landscape. So too has been the more prosaic but equally useful wartime issue of Ward Lock’s A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Cornwall,8 a wellthumbed copy of which Gardiner has used to inform him about the myriad places – from Sandymouth near Hartland in the far north, down the Porthtowan Coast and St Ives Bay into the Penwith heartland and around Land’s End peninsula, to the more sheltered environs of Mount’s Bay, Gunwalloe and the Lizard – about which he has made compelling pictures including Atlantic Breakers, Porthtowan Coast (plate 67). Gardiner’s essential artistic strength and expressive power is of a plastic, rather than naturalistic or descriptive, nature. Consistent with a spirit of scientific enquiry, Gardiner’s work turns robust process into a virtual reality that associates with the violent evolution of landscape over vast periods of time. The seismic movements, cataclysmic events and slow but thoroughgoing weathering that have shaped today’s landscape are replicated in the various abraded or accumulative collage processes of the studio. So much
69
70
| jeremy gardiner
66. Lighthouse, The Lizard, 2010 Acrylic and Jesmonite on poplar panel 46 x 61 cm (181⁄ 8 x 24 in) Private collection
133. Worbarrow Bay, April, 2012 Monoprint 26 x 155 cm (10¼ x 61 in)
103. Clavell Tower, Kimmeridge, 2009 Acrylic and Jesmonite on poplar panel 60 x 90 cm (23½ x 35½ in) Courtesy of Paisnel Gallery
112
| jeremy gardiner
Detail of plate 103, Clavell Tower, Kimmeridge, 2009
134. Swyre Head, Isle of Purbeck, March, 2012 Monoprint 26 x 155 cm (10¼ x 61 in)
146
| jeremy gardiner
| the process of finding out
147
to contact me telephone 020 7274 1243 mobile 07790 398 710 email: [email protected]
2014 1
The Art of
Jeremy Gardiner
In the Beginning Deep Mining in Dorset Ian Collins
Unfolding Landscape
Detail of plate 15, Moonlight, St Aldhelm’s Head to Gad Cliff, 2009
On a brilliant mid-summer morning, Jeremy Gardiner and I are basking in vast vistas of coastal Dorset – and then
Soon our feet are sticking to damp clay, for seams of useful stone (best of all the Purbeck Marble, descending in
descending, candles in hand, into a deep, dark hole. Treleven Haysom (the tenth generation of his family to mine and trade Purbeck stone) is leading us down a Victorian working quarry, which is now partly a museum.
bands of blue, green and grey) are separated by dirt, which must be dug out and carted away to release nature’s bounty. I for one suffer from claustrophobia, and have just been spooked by mental images of entombed miners –
Gardiner has an exhibition of pictures in a new showroom for the quarry’s stones and their various dressings. The strangely compelling relief abstractions – both airy and excavatory – suit their surroundings, and all
though now all my attention is taken in watching my step in guttering candlelight. Luckily this shaft is six-feet high, which is voluminous by the standards of old Dorset quarries. But, for guide, artist and author, that still raises
the more so since they seem to have been wrought on
the spectre of scalpings from sharp overhead projections. And then, suddenly, I am close to collision with what seems to be a star clinging to the ceiling. Or is this an antique mason’s symbol of a starfish, chipped into light relief like well-crafted graffiti? It is in fact the footprint cast of an iguanodon – a pre-historic monster weighing up to
layered, fractured and splintered panels of slate. Already from the car park we have seen great blocks of Purbeck Marble with striated marks where wedges were used to
The Art of
break off plinths for medieval churches and cathedrals.
Jeremy Gardiner
Other boulders strewn in the yard are edged with stalactite-like structures, as if culled from underground caverns. And many hunks of rock hold tiny shells which,
Unfolding Landscape
after countless millennia of tidal mayhem, will shortly make whorled decorations in smooth domestic surfaces.
Ian Collins Peter Davies Simon Martin Christiana Payne William Varley
I take a last look at the sea, glittering azure and turquoise, and at the bright white flank of Ballard Down –
Ian Collins, Peter Davies, Simon Martin, Christiana Payne, William Varley
now aware that chalk is composed of zillions of minute scales and shells called Coccoliths. How amazing to think that stones once lived.
LUND HUMPHRIES
three tonnes, extending maybe 10 metres and squelching through a swamp towards Swanage 140 million years ago, give or take a few million. Struck mute by the thought of that creature of awesome age and aspect towering above our twenty-first century heads, I experience the seismic shock that early nineteenth-century fossil discoveries in Dorset had on established thought, as fabulous beasts unknown to the Garden of Eden were found to have flourished and vanished. Those old bones
9
Jeremy Gardiner: Unfolding Landscape by Ian Collins, Peter Davies, Simon Martin, Christiana Payne and William Varley Lund Humphries 2012 270 × 249mm 160pp
24. Old Harry, 1996 Acrylic on birch panel 46 x 61 cm (18 x 24 in) Private collection
24
he first of its kind, this monograph provides a comprehensive assessment of Jeremy Gardiner’s career. He has taken the exploratory landscape vision of St Ives Modernists like Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and John Tunnard, into a new era. The artist’s unique geological interpretation of landscape not only describes the current lie of the land but portrays it as a complex outcome of natural processes over vast periods of time. Using for his inspiration the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, the rugged Atlantic coast of Cornwall and the volcanic regions of the Lake District and parts of Brazil these form his core subject matter. The work was shown at King’s Place at the end of 2012.
| jeremy gardiner
T
| in the beginning
25
30
seventeenth-century stone front of London’s Mercers Hall, and a clock tower (minus clock) from London Bridge was
one of the artist’s favourite pre-war Shell posters, by Graham Sutherland (1903–80). Here a quote from Pascal
set to guard the harbour. Burt incorporated columns from Waterloo Bridge and Billingsgate Market, statues from the Royal Exchange, and a Hyde Park Corner archway into his
seems to have been absorbed into Gardiner’s quest and art: ‘Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.’ Back in England, and on a typically resourceful
house and garden, before building himself a castle overlooking Durlston Head. There he planned an idyllic community, but no one wanted to join him. Today a cliff-
detective trail, Gardiner wanted to see Swanage through Paul Nash’s eyes, so in 1992 he rented his hero’s former home at 2 The Parade – a first-floor flat on the sea front.
walk past Tilly Whim Caves (plate 25) – a former quarry now closed to visitors, but once a source of wonderment
He painted on the balcony and indoors, looking from shadow into light and from an enclosed space to a huge
to the young Gardiner – leads to an immense Portlandstone globe surrounded by improving inscriptions, which is the most surreal sight of all (plate 26), and the subject of
expanse of sea and sky. The resulting Ballard Point pictures (plates 27–33) – exhibited in 2000 in London, New York and also on Swanage pier – pay homage to
61. Orcombe Point to Beer, 2009 Acrylic and Jesmonite on poplar panel 60 x 119 cm (23½ x 47 in) Private collection
| in the beginning
31
| making it new
65
| beyond st ives
71
62. Night, Dancing Ledge, 2009 Acrylic and Jesmonite on poplar panel 60 x 119 cm (23½ x 47 in)
were disseminated by Gardiner at MIT, but he also realised that these exploratory exercises had to be continually and intelligently renewed lest the course become stale and formulaic. He knew that projects had to be adapted to particular contexts. Working with an ‘elective’ group of (mainly science) students, he supervised the creation of a giant vector line drawing, using stakes and discarded reels of magnetic tape. It was inspired by Nazca line drawings, and as the MIT weekly newspaper pointed out, it required a ‘God’s eye view’13 to see it properly. Ever alert to the potential of new technologies, whilst at MIT Gardiner also experimented with digital imaging using a precursor of the Quantel paint box, as well as working with pioneering electronic prepress technologies. In addition to this he continued to develop his painting in a studio in Pearl Street, on the Bayfront in downtown Boston (plate 63). In 1985 he had a highly successful exhibition at Boston University; when he moved to New York he obtained a teaching post at the renowned Pratt Institute of Art and Design on the strength of it. Since the late 1930s Pratt Institute had its own version of the Bauhaus vorlehre, but under the leadership of the Mexican artist, Isaac Kerlow, Gardiner helped introduce new technologies and time-based media into the traditional curriculum. The New York art scene in the early 1980s was extraordinarily energetic and diverse. In the galleries the spectrum ran from Keith Haring (1958–90) to Donald Judd (1928–94), but the principal change lay in the reemergence of figuration. During the years dominated by Clement Greenberg’s (1909–94) absolutism, an abstract painter who introduced figurative elements would be
62
25. Tilly Whim Caves, 2009 Acrylic and Jesmonite on poplar panel 61 x 61 cm (24 x 24 in) Courtesy of Paisnel Gallery
| jeremy gardiner
considered morally suspect. With the decline of Greenberg’s hegemony, everything seemed possible. It was into this heady atmosphere that Gardiner brought the Brazilian photographer Veronica Falcão, who was later to become his wife. They had met at MIT’s Visible Language Workshop. As a Fulbright Scholar studying documentary film under Professor Richard Leacock, she was consolidating her experience of dance photography at the Municipal Theatre in Rio. Interestingly, their first meeting was in the darkroom of the celebrated American photographer Minor White, where she collaborated with Gardiner to produce gum bichromate prints. Not surprisingly, she was crucial too in his subsequent activity in Brazil, not only in organising a studio for him on Copacabana beach but also in making A Painter’s Palette, a short film of his painting expedition to the volcanic archipelago of Fernando de Noronha. During the late 1980s Gardiner exhibited in Brazil, and then in 1992 had sabbatical leave from Pratt Institute, moving back to London and teaching printmaking at the RCA. Returning to America in 1993, he moved to the New World School of the Arts in Miami where he introduced new digital technologies just as he had in New York. Whilst in America he made regular transatlantic trips to acquire working material for his Dorset paintings. The loyalty to the sites of his childhood adventures was, I suspect, reinforced by his admiration for the Polish artist Piotr Potworowski (1898–1962).
| jeremy gardiner
| making it new
63
64
| jeremy gardiner
3 Beyond St Ives
Gardiner’s mix of anthropomorphic and post-industrial
A New Landscape Vision
imagery, processed both through the traditional and high tech modes of plein air drawing and digital imaging respectively, gives his work a contemporary pertinence. Whereas many post-war artists (particularly Victor Pasmore’s (1908–98) group highlighted in the critic
Peter Davies
65. Sandymouth, 2007 Acrylic and Jesmonite on handmade paper 54 x 18 cm (21¼ x 71⁄ 8 in) Private collection
Lawrence Alloway’s book Nine Abstract Artists2 in 1954) sought analytic or mathematical blueprints for natural form and structure, informed by books like Wentworth D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form3 and Jay Hambidge’s Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by the Artists4, Gardiner has chosen for his intellectual Detail of plate 77, Spring, Zennor Head, 2010
Jeremy Gardiner’s identity as a searchingly inventive landscape painter is not limited to work made in
challenging and geomorphically varied set of subjects, but with the daunting weight of artistic precedence
response to those spectacular stretches of coastline – Dorset’s Jurassic Coast and Cornwall’s West Penwith peninsula – that have perhaps moved him more than any
centred on the celebrated art colony of St Ives. Gardiner’s place in the influential, not to say popular, modern movement in Cornwall is inevitably predicated
other. Other landscapes, well-removed from the favoured West Country, have provided important, if ancillary,
on his being a visiting, rather than domiciled, ‘arriviste’, an almost post-modern interpreter of a well-established
alternatives for his compounded topographic, archaeological and geomorphological vision. Similarly, the appropriation of the taut, textural and abraded landscape style of the St Ives school artists like Ben Nicholson (1894–1982), Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004),
mid-century landscape abstraction. Though perhaps the most ambitious among his peers, Gardiner is certainly not alone in taking forward the essential achievements of the modernising St Ives landscape artists. In recent years, younger artists have
Peter Lanyon (1918–64), Alexander Mackenzie (1923– 2002) and John Wells (1907–2000), important though their influences have been, has been complemented, indeed expanded, by exposure to the conceptual rigours and hard-headed formalism of American art, made
subjected the romanticism of mystically or scientifically inspired imagery to an analytic formalism drawn from diverse modern movements like cubism, constructivism and expressionism or – where the inimitable Lizard-based John Tunnard (1900–71) was concerned – surrealism.
available to him through his distinguished 14-year teaching career in the US. Where Cornwall is concerned, this vital and intelligent artist who has focused on the twisting and undulating coastline – as in Sandymouth (plate 65),
Gardiner has therefore alighted, perhaps uniquely, on a hybrid style informed as much by American formalism as by the pastoralism of the English ‘school’. The critic Charles Darwent therefore aptly concludes that ‘Jeremy Gardiner’s art recognises that modernity is cumulative,
based on the wild, windy Atlantic edge, and Lighthouse, The Lizard (plate 66) based on the less exposed
that newness is built upon oldness’.1 The uncanny interface between the new and the old is a timely feature of much millennium-period art, and
southern shores – has had to contend not only with a
framework sources that have been more purely relevant to geology and landscape. William Buckland’s Geology and Mineralogy,5 Richard Fortey’s The Hidden Landscape: Journey into the Geological Past,6 and The Earth7 have been of prime significance to Gardiner’s thinking about landscape. So too has been the more prosaic but equally useful wartime issue of Ward Lock’s A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Cornwall,8 a wellthumbed copy of which Gardiner has used to inform him about the myriad places – from Sandymouth near Hartland in the far north, down the Porthtowan Coast and St Ives Bay into the Penwith heartland and around Land’s End peninsula, to the more sheltered environs of Mount’s Bay, Gunwalloe and the Lizard – about which he has made compelling pictures including Atlantic Breakers, Porthtowan Coast (plate 67). Gardiner’s essential artistic strength and expressive power is of a plastic, rather than naturalistic or descriptive, nature. Consistent with a spirit of scientific enquiry, Gardiner’s work turns robust process into a virtual reality that associates with the violent evolution of landscape over vast periods of time. The seismic movements, cataclysmic events and slow but thoroughgoing weathering that have shaped today’s landscape are replicated in the various abraded or accumulative collage processes of the studio. So much
69
70
| jeremy gardiner
66. Lighthouse, The Lizard, 2010 Acrylic and Jesmonite on poplar panel 46 x 61 cm (181⁄ 8 x 24 in) Private collection
133. Worbarrow Bay, April, 2012 Monoprint 26 x 155 cm (10¼ x 61 in)
103. Clavell Tower, Kimmeridge, 2009 Acrylic and Jesmonite on poplar panel 60 x 90 cm (23½ x 35½ in) Courtesy of Paisnel Gallery
112
| jeremy gardiner
Detail of plate 103, Clavell Tower, Kimmeridge, 2009
134. Swyre Head, Isle of Purbeck, March, 2012 Monoprint 26 x 155 cm (10¼ x 61 in)
146
| jeremy gardiner
| the process of finding out
147
to contact me telephone 020 7274 1243 mobile 07790 398 710 email: [email protected]
