Vanessa Gardiner

Vanessa Gardiner was born in Oxford in 1960. She completed a Foundation Course at Oxford Polytechnic in 1978-1979, followed by a BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree at Central School of Art & Design, London. Vanessa currently lives & works in Dorset.

Vanessa has won awards such as the Fine Art Award from Art Council South West and has her work in both private and corporate collections including, the Dorset Museum, The Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, Bournemouth University, British School at Athens, and Carlow Art Collection in Ireland.

“Vanessa Gardiner is expert at recognising and depicting the geometry in nature. Her paintings are full of coastal light and the way the sea engages the shore in an endless dialogue. In a sense the sea draws the landscape, excavating it and caressing it over centuries, sculpting it into the most intricate and specific shapes. Gardiner identifies this elemental relationship and makes it the focus of her imagery: history and geology play their roles too, and her paintings incorporate a sense of other disciplines, especially archaeology and architecture. These various energies and components are resolved into a still image which yet also contains movement….

…Gardiner’s crisply authoritative abstract shapes and beautifully worked surfaces combine with her resonant colour to make images of serenity and power. If the inlets and bays she paints so evocatively are celebrated through her understanding of the interplay of geometry and nature, her paintings are also vessels of light, containers of clarity, rhythm and balance. They speak to us of recollected action, of experience sifted through memory. Their radiance moves and beguiles us.”  Andrew Lambirth

Vanessa Gardiner has been represented by Thackeray Gallery since 2013.