Vanessa Gardiner

Vanessa Gardiner, born in Oxford 1960, studied at Central School of Art and Design, London 1979-1982. With numerous regular exhibitions in Dorset and London, Gardiner won the Prince of Wales Bursary for the Arts at British School at Athens in 2009 and the Fine Art Award from Arts Council South West in 2003 and 1999.

Paintings by Vanessa Gardiner are in the following Public Collections:

British Academy, London
British School at Athens, Greece
Magdalen College, Oxford
Fidelity International London/Dublin
Huddersfield City Art Gallery
New Hall, Cambridge
The Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art,

The Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Co. Mayo, Ireland
Carlow Art Collection, Carlow, Ireland
Bournemouth University
The Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital, Exeter - Arts in Hospital

"Vanessa Gardiner is expert at recognising and depicting the geometry in

nature. Her paintings are full of coastal light and the way the sea engages the

shore in an endless dialogue. In a sense the sea draws the landscape,

excavating it and caressing it over centuries, sculpting it into the most

intricate and specific shapes. Gardiner identifies this elemental relationship

and makes it the focus of her imagery: history and geology play their roles

too, and her paintings incorporate a sense of other disciplines, especially

archaeology and architecture. These various energies and components are

resolved into a still image which yet also contains movement.

Gardiner's crisply authoritative abstract shapes and beautifully worked

surfaces combine with her resonant colour to make images of serenity and

power. If the inlets and bays she paints so evocatively are celebrated through

her understanding of the interplay of geometry and nature, her paintings are

also vessels of light, containers of clarity, rhythm and balance. They speak to

us of recollected action, of experience sifted through memory. Their radiance

moves and beguiles us."

Andrew Lambirth 2021