Lulworth Cove IV
50cm x 35cm
A gift of Lulworth Cove IV was given to the Victoria Art Gallery in recognition of Jon Bennington’s tenure
as Director of the gallery.
‘Works on paper have always formed a vital element of Jeremy Gardiner’s artistic practice. Twenty
Stations of the Dorset Coast, a series begun in 2018, maps the shoreline eastwards from Lyme Regis
to Old Harry Rocks. The title consciously evokes Hiroshige’s Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō
(1833), a sequence of woodcuts spanning a journey from Edo (Tokyo) to Kyoto.
During the blazing summer of 2018, Gardiner erected a marquee outside his studio. Inside, a tank
was filled with a solution of carrageen moss, paint floated on top, agitated, and paper dipped. The
technique is centuries’ old, often used to create decorative endpapers for books. In his series of
prints, The Waves (1989), Frank Stella used marbling to imply a watery element, often in a spectrum
of psychedelic colour. Marbling, in Gardiner’s work, represents both chance and calculation: chance
in achieving ‘a line that you would never make by hand, and a density of tone that you wouldn’t be
able to put down with a brush’, 1 and calculation in its telling use to imply a rock fissure, tide or cloud
drift. Lulworth Cove IV is a perfect example, cerulean and amethyst is a perfect example, fixing on
paper the movement of water as curvilinear and geometric forms dance rhythmically across the
surface of in shades of turquoise. Gum arabic slows drying, increasing the transparency and
luminosity of colour. In the contrast of greens, translucent and opaque, untouched paper against solid
tone, the sea swirls and effervesces.’
Judith LeGrove, Jeremy Gardiner – South by Southwest, Sansom and Co 2020 Fig. 48, reproduced
p.65, in colour.