St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington, Hampshire SO41 9BH.
To coincide with the exhibition, Gardiner talked to an audience of 100+ in Lymington about his ‘South by Southwest’ project, including the places he has visited, the artists who have preceded him and the influence of posters and popular art on his latest body of work. There was also a book signing as part of the event.
Jeremy Gardiner has spent the last five years exploring locations on Britain’s south coast. This voyage has resulted in a new body of work gathered in ‘South by Southwest’, the book and accompanying touring exhibition.
Gardiner has taken his inspiration, not only from the natural world which has long been a feature of his work, but from popular portrayals of the coastal landscape in travel posters, guide books, postcards and ViewMaster reels.
South by Southwest portrays the stretch of coast from Ilfracombe in North Devon to St Margaret’s Bay in Kent, through the unique vision of landscape painter Jeremy Gardiner. In this latest series of paintings, created over the past five years, Gardiner demonstrates an acute sense of his place in history, and the history of place: the geology, maritime history and industrial heritage of this constantly evolving coast, a shoreline that has long held a fascination for British artists.
Gardiner’s points of reference range from 19th-century landscape painting to Shell posters, from the St Ives modernists to picture postcards. Each offers a key to a view, over which Gardiner layers his own memory of a place, accumulated through time, changing light and weather. Capturing the hidden structures and movement of landscape, as well as the detail of harbours, piers and lighthouses, his paintings are specific though never insular.
South by Southwest, the book, includes essays by leading art historians Andrew Lambirth, Christiana Payne and Judith LeGrove.
176 pages / 230 x 260mm
hardback with full colour illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-911408-43-7