The Art of Jeremy Gardiner: Unfolding Landscape

Providing a comprehensive assessment of Jeremy Gardiner's career to date, this monograph, the first of its kind, explains how this distinctive artist has taken the exploratory landscape vision of mid-century St Ives modernists like Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and John Tunnard into a new post-millennial era. Gardiner's unique geological interpretation of landscape not only describes the current lie of the land but portrays it as a complex outcome of natural processes over vast periods of time. While indebted to British and American modernism, Gardiner's new conceptual rigour and technical repertoire is informed by science, geomorphology, new technologies and direct physical engagement with ancient landscapes. Following a distinguished international teaching career, based in Britain and the United States, Gardiner's landscape subjects have included geographically varied locations from the Jurassic Coast in his native Dorset and the rugged Atlantic seaboard of Cornwall, to the jagged volcanic topographies of the Brazilian oceanic islands and the Lake District. Including essays from leading art writers, this book provides an insight into the career of one of Britain's most innovative contemporary landscape artists.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Foreword, Wendy Baron; In the Beginning: Deep Mining in Dorset, Ian Collins; Making it New: What Lies Beneath, William Varley; Beyond St Ives: A New Landscape Vision, Peter Davies; Landscape in Four Dimensions: Gardiner and the British Tradition, Christiana Payne; The Process of Finding Out: On Jeremy Gardiner's Working Methods, Simon Martin; Notes; Bibliography; Chronology; Select Solo and Group Exhibitions; Collections; Photographic Credits; Index.

About the Author :
Wendy Baron OBE was Director of the Government Art Collection (1978-97). She has also been a Trustee of the Contemporary Art Society (1997-2001) and The Art Fund (1998-2010). Her books include Sickert (1973), The Camden Town Group (1979), Perfect Moderns (2000) and Sickert: Paintings and Drawings (2006). She is currently working on British Art: 1900-1945 for Yale University Press. Ian Collins is an art writer and curator. His books include a trilogy on East Anglian art and monographs on John McLean (2009) and John Craxton (2011). Peter Davies is an established author and critic on modern British art. His previous books include Art in Poole and Dorset (1987), Michael Kenny Sculpture (1997) and St Ives: Art Colony in Transition (2007). Simon Martin is Head of Curatorial Services at Pallant House Gallery. His books and catalogues include Poets in the Landscape: The Romantic Spirit in British Art (2007), Colin Self: Art in the Nuclear Age (2008), John Tunnard: Inner Space to Outer Space (2010) and the monograph Edward Burra (2011). Christiana Payne is a Reader in the History of Art at Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Rustic Simplicity: Scenes of Cottage Life in Nineteenth-century British Art (1998), Where the Sea meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-century Britain (2007) and John Brett, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter (2010). William Varley succeeded Victor Pasmore, Richard Hamilton and Ian Stephenson as Director of Foundation Studies at Newcastle University Fine Art Department, from 1970- 2000. Throughout his teaching career, he had a parallel metier as an art critic and broadcaster, principally as regional reviewer for the Guardian.

Review :
'Jeremy Gardiner's paintings of the southern English coast draw on the mid-century abstraction of the St Ives school, with a millennial twist. This is the first monograph on the pioneering landscapist, and it considers both the resonance of his poetic forms and the new technologies (such as 3D digital imaging and geomorphology) that give rise to them.' Apollo