Vanessa Gardiner
Promontory 2
Vanessa Gardiner's work is the result of her empathy with the wild and imposing stretch of coastline around Boscastle harbour in North Cornwall, an area familiar to her since childhood. It is a primal landscape of exposed dark slate, formed by geological conflicts on a massive timescale and bearing fascinating traces of long-standing human activity.
'For the past eight my work has been based on the coastline around Boscastle, North Cornwall. This is a dramatic landscape, much battered by the elements and where the natural crook of the harbour is almost enclosed by the precipitous forms of the dark-slate cliffs.
It is from high vantage points that I like to base my paintings. I make a series of closely-observed drawings, spending some hours on each in order to establish a deeper identification with the landscape. The experience gained from this is put to use creating pictures back in the studio.
I work in acrylic on plywood, which is often much sanded back and scoured rigorously with wire wool; the ply itself is invariably cut and reassembled. I see these processes as being crucial to the paintings and their development. Working across a number of pieces at any given time, I find that ideas from one picture will feed into the others, and then back again. Naturally it can take some months to achieve resolution, with each painting aquiring, in some sense, a kind of 'family history' but also standing up as a statement on its own.
From this it follows that the initial drawing has become less direct as an influence on the look of the finished work, which now owes its appearance more to a kind of internal cross-referencing. This has resulted, since my last Hart Gallery show, in my paintings becoming more abstract as I search for the essential spirit of the landscape.
Vanessa Gardiner 2003