Strata 2018

In Strata, the echoes arising from repeated depictions become apparent when Gardiner’s five paintings of a site are placed alongside one another, although this is not necessarily how he would choose to display them. Painting en plein air, in Strata’s early stages, he instilled his works on paper with colour combinations derived from light, the time of day and the seasons. In autumn, the dramatic chalk headland of White Nothe blazes in shades of russet and black; by winter, it is translucent turquoise green.

The position of the drawings in these compositions is relatively consistent. With other works, such as those based on West Bay, it varies considerably. Focusing on the distinctive feature of the gabled house, at the foot of the cliff at West Bay, shows how the composition shifts within the limits of its support, altering the height of the horizon, the depth of sky or breadth of sea. Colour, too, creates its own variations upon landscape. Gardiner talks of trying to capture the psychedelic feel of these places: the magic and vibrancy of the space. There are idiosyncratic colour combinations in his paintings – salmon, orange, acid yellow, turquoise – that seem to mirror this vividly.

Strata’s paintings on paper incorporate a further technique for the first time. In the summer of 2018, working in a marquee in his garden, Gardiner learnt the process of marbling. Paint, dropped into tanks of water thickened with carrageenan (extracted from seaweed), floats in pebble-like shapes. Subsequent additions of colour can be combed, agitated or feathered. Dipping paper into the liquid, it became coated with veined patterns familiar from the endpapers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books, including the leatherbound set of F. E. Hulme’s Familiar Wild Flowers, owned by Gardiner’s grandmother, that had prompted him to attempt marbling. Beguiling though the effects were, he chose only to retain certain areas: others were rinsed away or over-painted. In Durdle Door I (2021), marbling reinforces the trajectory of the coast and intersects with clifftop paths to resemble molten rock.