Painter, Mark Gardiner

12 December 2001 - 13 January 2002 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
A self-taught artist of remarkable vision, Mark Gardiner has created a substantial body of paintings over just a few years. We are very proud to be able to exhibit his work publicly for the first time.

Gardiner has come to his practise relatively late in life. A car accident left him hospitalised for four months, cutting short a successful business career and changing his life irrevocably. Gardiner is a painter who can express directly and honestly, with both bold imagination and a lightness of touch, complex emotional and psychological states. Inventive and fearless, he paints with conviction and dedication, his work providing a rare marriage of sophistication and intuition.

Gardiner has painted a number of pictures of himself, his wife and his children (of which there are eleven). They’re the sort of scenes you might find in any family photo album. However, he captures something far stronger than the snapshot. Rarely sentimental, his work brings out the wonder and nobility in family life, revealing that the most magical things in our lives can be the most ordinary.

A committed Christian, Gardiner considers painting a natural extension of his religious beliefs. Alongside the celebrations of the natural world and family life included in this exhibition, he has painted works that clearly state his opposition to war, poverty, and abortion. Like the work of Stanley Spencer (and early domestic and religious based work of Michael Smither), Gardiner’s paintings often revisit biblical subjects, reflecting his belief in the ongoing relevance and vitality of the Christian tradition. Whatever his subject however, the preciousness of human life is always at its core - be it a picture of a son’s first steps or of figures descending a waterfall. Gardiner is pro-life in every sense.

Just as in life, there is also a healthy dose of surreal comedy. In The Creation of Woman a pantomime unfolds starring a jester-like Devil, whilst in the foreground Eve rises from Adam’s ribs. With Siesta at Freyberg Beach there’s such a strong observational eye that Gardiner could be making a pitch for painter of the antipodean take on Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. Behind the hilariously self-conscious, languid bathers, lounge figures that appear to have magic-carpeted onto the foreshore from a scene by Gauguin. In a Gardiner painting the surreal feels less the grand theatrical gesture of a Dali and more just simply natural.

It’s increasingly common to hear an artist like Gardiner labelled a ‘naïve’ or ‘outsider’ artist. Using such a brand here would run the risk of obscuring the fact that, in any company, this is work of great maturity and persuasion. For now, ‘Painter, Mark Gardiner’ will do.

 

Mark Amery and Gregory O’Brien