Tim Gardner on his new exhibition, studying in Manitoba, his process, and more
Tim Gardner. Roy with Red Cup, 2012. Pastel on paper. Purchased 2014. Accession number 45996. National Gallery of Canada.
Tim Gardner: The Full Story will showcase 125 artworks from the American-Canadian painter’s 20+ year career. The exhibition, curated by WAG-Qaumajuq Director and CEO, Dr. Stephen Borys, shares Gardner’s unique perspective on North American middle-class life.
When you enter the exhibition, you’ll be blown away by the technical skill Gardner employs. He captures seemingly mundane moments of everyday life and documents in them such precise detail. Read for Gardner’s commentary:
On painting his family:
TG: When I started out painting my brother and his friends, it was because it was the subject matter I was most familiar with. And I have always been interested in painting my most immediate subjects: my brothers, my Dad and Mom, and other portraits. It was really about finding the subject matter that I knew something about. It’s like they say, “running away from home or running back”. It is also about figuring out who you are; and for me, a lot of making art is about making sense of the world, and you do that by self-examination. In the early days in the 1990s, when I first started doing the spring break pictures, my brothers and their friends thought it was really cool, they even supplied the subject matter with their photos. The family portraits were more of a limited project. I was visiting my parent’s home one year and came across these photographs, almost like an archive. It struck me that these were going to be a good subject for a body of work. They’re always about looking back through this filter of nostalgia, which is pretty important to me. The family pictures also relate to the way I depict New York and LA. It’s looking back at places I’ve been.
On art school at the University of Manitoba:
TG: The person that I was expecting to work with at U of M was Ivan Eyre. He was the main drawing instructor for basic design, but when I arrived, he had just retired so I ended up working with Steve Gouthro for those drawing classes. In the first year there was fundamentals of drawing and basic design, and in the second year, I moved into painting. For painting, I was with Diane Whitehouse, and later, Steve Higgins. For advanced drawing and the thesis classes, I had Sharon Allward. It was a four-year program at U of M, and I learned the basics, including all the preparatory work like stretching watercolour paper, preparing the oil paints, stretching and priming the canvas, mixing up a medium for oil painting. Those fundamentals were taught when you were learning to draw and paint. Early on in my studies I knew this is what I wanted to do but I didn’t know how exactly that would play out. And by third year, I knew that I would apply to grad school, and move on to an MFA program.
On photo composition:
TG: Sometimes I’ll be at the grocery store and think “this will make a great scene for a painting” and then I’ll start photographing it to use later. Other times, it’s somewhere I’ve been and happen to be taking pictures, like travel pictures, and not really thinking about a painting, but I know it will later come into use. But in terms of composing a picture based on those photographs, it usually ends up being a composite of a bunch of different pictures. And some of the early watercolours of spring break scenes, they’re often just copies of the photos themselves. I learned a while ago that if you take a picture randomly, it can end up becoming significant source material, based on what happens to be in the picture. Eventually whatever you photograph can be used later so there’s potential anywhere you go. If there’s a certain image that comes to mind that I want to paint, I know where to go back to find the subject. It’s like going back to a certain moment of time in LA.
On the banal and the sublime:
TG: The banal to me means the everyday life or nostalgic experiences, like family get togethers or things like that. The sublime means basically the natural sublime such as what you find in the landscape or certain experiences where you’re having an intense experience in nature. I guess even being close to death or when there’s an element of danger in a landscape, like a mountain landscape. But I think most people’s idea of the sublime is closer to something like a sunset, which can fall into sentimentality really easily. And that’s something that can also become banal very easily. I hadn’t been thinking about landscape before the 2000s, before I got into watercolour. The German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich was someone I started looking at, among others. His work is another side of the sublime. I started becoming influenced by a completely different group of historical artists, sometimes based on their subject matter, and sometimes based on their chosen media.
Learn more about Gardner’s work and hear from the artist himself on Friday, October 6 at the public opening celebration of The Full Story – this event is free for all to attend. The exhibition officially opens on Saturday, October 7.
This exhibition is presented by Michael Nesbitt, supported by The Appleton Initiative at WAG-Qaumajuq, supported by the Appleton Charitable Foundation, and by the following Collectors Circle members: Hazel & Stephen Borys, Bryan Klein Law Corporation, Daniel Bubis & Jennifer Blumenthal, and Margaret Hucal.
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My late husband Grant Marshall, while on sabbatical, studied painting with Diana Whitehouse in the nineties. Grant told me there was a brilliant young painter in the class who he thought would have a big future. and it was Tim Gardner.