Profile

Jeremy Gardiner is a graduate of Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art. He exhibits regularly with Paisnel Gallery in St James’s, London and the Belgrave Gallery in St Ives. His paintings have been exhibited in Europe, the USA, South America, Japan, Australia and China. He has won numerous awards throughout his career including a Churchill Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Harkness Fellowship. He lived in the United States for 14 years and taught at MIT’s Media Lab, Pratt Institute of Art and Design in New York and at Bennington College, Vermont. In the UK he has taught at the Royal College of Art and is currently Course Director for Postgraduate studies at Ravensbourne, London. Gardiner’s paintings are represented in public and corporate collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Government Art Collection, BNP Paribas, Pincent Masons and Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi. He has had recent exhibitions at Pallant House Gallery, UK and the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City.

Jeremy Gardiner’s artistic excavation of the geology of landscape is shaped both by human activity and forces of nature. He interprets, through his painting and printmaking, a variety of landscapes that contain the marks and secrets of their own distant formation, giving them a unique, contemporary depth and beauty. His artistic exploration has taken him from the Jurassic Coast of Dorset to the rugged coast of Cornwall, the Oceanic islands of Brazil, the arid beauty of the island of Milos in Greece and more recently the Lake District and its numerous waterfalls.

Gardiner’s spatially probing and texturally explicit pictures creatively transform the lessons learnt from pioneering modern British landscape painters such as John Tunnard, Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and the American artist Richard Diebenkorn.

For several decades I have been exploring the ancient history of the Jurassic Coast in Dorset on long walks, boat rides and flights, forever seeking out new points of view for my landscape painting. This curiosity combined with an adventurous spirit has led me to investigate the geology of other parts of the world, from the volcanic forms of Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago 300 miles off the NE coast of Brazil, to Milos, one of the Cycladian Greek islands.

But it is Dorset that stirs my imagination the most and I am constantly drawn towards it, making new discoveries and finding fresh sources of inspiration as I venture further into unknown territory. The Jurassic Coast is England’s first natural World Heritage Site, a ninety five mile long stretch of coastline running from Orcombe Point in East Devon to Old Harry Rocks in East Dorset. Its geology spans the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, 185 million years of the Earth’s history. Erosion by sea, weather and human activity has resulted in a huge variety of different landforms; cliffs, beaches, landslides, arches and caves, which provide an incredibly rich visual and scientific resource.

My sense of atmosphere and form has been strongly influenced by this natural environment on the coast while my colour palette reflects this connection; sometimes the methods I use for constructing a painting are forced in new directions by a desire to honour specific features in the landscape. By creating distinct layers of colour, my working method involves scouring, building accretions of paint, collaging and sanding down, in an attempt to emulate on the surface of my paintings the effects of geological time on the landscape. I like to combine different features from different locations of the coastline in the same paintings, achieving images that take the viewer on a new exploration of familiar territory, from multiple perspectives.