Vanessa Gardiner



Palamidi 4, 2011, Acrylic on hardboard
42 x 25 cm

VANESSA GARDINER - AEGEAN COASTS

In April 2008 I visited Greece for the first time - it was only for five days to Athens - but it seemed both necessary and urgent for me to follow a newly discovered architectural direction in my work and to see the Parthenon with its embodiment of pure architecture, order and clarity.  I accompanied this with a trip later in the same year to the Peloponnese and began a series of drawings from the Argolid landscape knowing that there was much more to pursue and that it would be essential for me to return if I were to explore these ideas in depth.

With this in mind, I applied to the British School at Athens for a grant and was delighted to be awarded the Prince of Wales’ Bursary for the Arts, enabling me in April 2009 to embark on a series of trips to Greece.   It proved an immensely rewarding and productive time, enriching my work profoundly and resulting in a large number of drawings and watercolours, many of which I have used as essential source material for the paintings in this exhibition.

I made a decision from the start to make several separate visits to Greece. This fitted in with the process of how I work: returning repeatedly to specific places of interest to glean more information to use in the paintings back in the studio.

I am pleased I decided to spend the time in this way, as it has meant that I have had the chance to travel around some of the country and in doing so I have seen both the different aspects between places as well as the surprising similarities which the landscapes can reveal. I have had the benefit of returning to the same places at different times of year - so seeing say Mycenae in the dry, arid heat of late August and then looking remarkably green in early December. The citadel, which appears in summer to be so harmoniously placed within the landscape, seemed quite stark and fortress-like against the dark hills in December. I have also become acutely aware of the significance of the sea and the way it connects the country together and in a sense is as much a positive as the land itself.

Staying first in Athens at the British School in April, where apart from drawing from the south slopes of the Acropolis and the Pnyx, I also visited Sounion on the Attica peninsula as well as the island of Aegina.  Later in the summer I went to the Peloponnese, staying in Nafplion, which has proved hugely fruitful and has resulted in a number paintings based on the Argolid coast. 

From Nafplion, I made trips out to the ancient sites of Mycenae, Tiryns, Epidauros, Asine and to Monemvasia.  I then carried on down to the Cycladic island of Paros - initially to fulfil a long-standing wish to see Delos, which I did, but I also became unexpectedly attached to Paros, and the inland village of Lefkes in particular.

In the winter months I re-visited the Peloponnese and went back to Sounion a number of times.  I had by then begun several paintings based on the Attica coastline and I felt I needed to check that I was doing justice to the place in my more abstract compositions back at home.

I wanted to use the opportunity whilst in Greece to draw as much as I could, knowing that it might not all be of immediate use, but that I could refer back to it sometime in the future.  Equally, I was very much aware of not overloading my visual senses with too much subject matter in which to consolidate into paintings.

I always take a sketchbook with me to the landscapes I work from, tending to use small books as they are more practical to hold standing up and are useful for both quick, urgent sketches as well as for longer, more detailed, observational drawings. Often I draw across two pages and sometimes, if I find the landscape I am working from is larger than the space I have to use, I have a mechanism for folding the pages over and working on the next sheets, thereby being able to continue the drawing that way. I feel it necessary to know a place well before attempting to develop it further and I couldn’t envisage starting paintings from landscapes without the initial process of drawing. I can in some sense then feel justified in abstracting and re-ordering the landscapes into the carefully selected compositions I use in the paintings. In my experience with drawing, what you actually see is invariably more interesting than anything which could have been invented.  It is through drawing that you start to truly look and imprint and interiorise a lasting image in your mind.  It is then that you might notice all the idiosyncrasies that characterise the Greek landscape - the singular, pure line of the hills, the sharp quality of the sea when it abuts against the coast and the co-existence within the landscape of an elegant linearity with strong geometrical forms.   I use drawing fundamentally, therefore, as a tool for exploring new shapes and directions to use in my paintings knowing that these will be true to the place.  On one occasion I spent all day drawing the headlands at Sounion but it was only while waiting for the bus back to Athens that I made a quickly executed small drawing which I knew had all the information I would need to translate into the formal composition for a painting.  Equally, however, I doubt I would have arrived at such a focused result without having spent the day drawing intensely.

Watercolours have proved an excellent medium for such a hot climate: they dry quickly and have a freshness, vitality and spontaneity, which is good for attempting to capture the particular light of Greece.  There is also an immediacy about watercolour that is both enjoyable and rewarding.  I tend to use them alongside pencil, re-drawing over the paint while it dries.  A similar process, therefore, to solely drawing directly from the subject matter, but less controlled and ordered and essentially providing me with the vital colour notes I need.

All of this information then feeds into my paintings back in the studio.  Certain drawings and watercolours will go onto the wall and I’ll start to select those elements I feel will best evoke the landscape - a distillation, in a sense, of the lines, shapes and colours.

The painting process I have developed over the years is a crucial part of the work and involves a continuous series of procedures:  I paint in acrylic on plywood or hardboard.   Frequently I will re-draw the image, scouring and sanding back the paint until the surface becomes abraded and enlivened, taking on a beautiful patina and revealing qualities of its own.  At times I might completely obliterate the picture with white gesso, which I then sand and scour away before re-working. I might work on a series of six of seven paintings at a time, rotating them in the studio as I go, so that ideas from one will feed into others, having the effect of unifying them together. I use board as it is a strong, rigid surface that responds well to this process and I like the way the history of the paint and incised lines remain in the grain of wood. The board also gives me the freedom to change the composition of a painting if necessary by cutting it down and not therefore restricting the work to a prescribed format. It is this physical process, together with the rational ordering of the image in my mind that I find so enthralling: the linearity of the graphite with the rubbed paint surfaces and the unexpected results that may then occur.

Vanessa Gardiner 2011