Since graduating from the Central
School of Art and Design, London in 1982, Vanessa Gardiner has become a highly
acclaimed and much admired landscape painter whose work has been showed
extensively across the UK and beyond, appearing in many important collections
including Magdalen College, Oxford and the British Academy, London.
As a landscape painter Vanessa Gardiner
is captivated both by the beauty of the places in which her work is based and
by the processes involved during the making of the paintings. In a sense they
go hand-in-hand: the immediacy of drawing directly from the seemingly haphazard
natural subject matter, with the careful selection and ordering of the compositions
back in the studio.
Concentrating on the singular coastlines around Cornwall, Ireland and more recently Greece, Gardiner has become increasingly aware of the connecting elements found within these landscapes. A bursary awarded by the British School at Athens in 2009 further focused her interest in the geometry of architecture and its relationship with both the landscape and the visual language she uses within her work.