Take his 2012 pastel-on-paper work Nick and Tobi on Ferry. It’s a meticulously detailed portrait done in a classical style, the kind you might find hanging in a great hall (or, yes, in an art gallery). Except the men are dressed in baseball caps and sweatshirts, they are eating takeout out of a sauce-splattered Styrofoam clamshell container balanced on a lap, and they are sitting on the worn leather seats of public transportation.
“I just thought that was funny,” Gardner says with a smile.
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
Artist Tim Gardner’s family moved to Winnipeg in the early ’90s when he was in high school.
That piece, along with almost 140 others, is featured in Tim Gardner: The Full Story, which opens this weekend at WAG-Qaumajuq. Curated by WAG-Qaumajuq director and CEO Stephen Borys, The Full Story is the Iowa-born, Ontario-raised artist’s first retrospective and largest solo exhibition to date, drawn from public and private collections from across North America.
“This is my first time seeing it all together,” Gardner says while sitting in the gallery, surrounded by art spanning 30 years of his career.
“It’s still sinking in. It’s really interesting to see, especially the older works. Just the ideas I was working on then, and the technique is different then, too.
“It’s kind of mind-blowing to see everything all together.”
Gardner, 50, recreates scenes based on snapshots of everyday life he takes or collects. He paints things and places, too — with watercolours he turns, hilariously, a ribfest into a breathtakingly beautiful landscape — but he began with people.
“The very beginning works were a lot about my two brothers and their friends, and all their hijinks hanging out,” he says.
Tim Gardner’s 2002 watercolour painting Ribfest
His works explore a softer, more playful side of masculinity and male camaraderie. The men in Gardner’s photorealist watercolours and pastels aren’t kings, or conquerors, or gods, or war heroes, or Jesus. They’re just guys.
“The delicate medium with the masculine subject matter really appealed to me,” says Gardner, who is now based in Red Deer, Alta. “Just how the medium could kind of undermine the subject matter a little.”
It’s a tension he discovered by accident.
“Originally in art school, I was doing the same images, but on a large scale in oil paint, so it was more, I would say, aggressive towards the viewer, like a confrontational experience looking at the paintings,” says the artist. “And that wasn’t what I was going for. It was a bit too much.”
He started using watercolours as a matter of convenience; he was travelling, visiting his parents, and watercolours are portable.
“The combination of the watercolour with this snapshot imagery really clicked for me,” he says. “And it was like a new medium, too. I had never seen something like that before.”
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
Tim Gardner: The Full Story, opens this weekend at WAG-Qaumajuq. The exhibition is the Iowa-born, Ontario-raised artist’s first retrospective and largest solo show to date.
That medium appealed to Borys as a curator, as well.
“On one level, I just love the subject matter, which is just the life of Tim, everyday life,” he says. “On the other hand, incredibly, technically profound work, these watercolors and pastels.”
It’s meaningful that Gardner’s first retrospective should happen in Winnipeg. His family moved to the city in the early ’90s when he was a high school senior, and it was in the art room at Fort Richmond Collegiate where the seeds of a career were planted.
“I had a supportive art teacher, Allan Geske, who helped me put together a portfolio for a university,” Gardner says. Some of his Fort Richmond-era still lifes are actually on view in the exhibition.
Gardner graduated with a BFA from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art in 1996 before moving to New York City to earn his MFA from Columbia University in 1999. He started showing at 303 Gallery in New York and has gone on to be featured in solo and group exhibitions all over the world.
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
The men in Gardner’s photorealist watercolours and pastels aren’t kings, or conquerors, or gods, or war heroes, or Jesus. They’re just guys.
His process hasn’t changed much over the past three decades, but technology has sped it up. In the ’90s when he was taking pictures, he was using film.
“I’d just be taking hundreds of pictures all the time and going into London Drugs or wherever and getting it all developed,” he says. “I just have these shoeboxes full of thousands of pictures in my studio.”
When the first digital cameras came out, it was revolutionary.
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“I was able to see the image as soon as I took it, and you could delete an image that didn’t work, and there was no waiting around to see what you actually had a picture of,” he says.
Roy, the tree planter from Gardner’s pastel-on-paper work Roy with Red Cup — a bandana keeping his sandy-brown hair out his eyes, which are squinting in the morning sun, a stunning vista of misted mountaintops behind him as he enjoys a cup of joe — has become, literally, the poster boy for the show. Roy with Red Cup is featured on a 40-foot promotional banner suspended on the outside of the building.
“I’m hoping that someone who’s never been to the WAG drives by and says, ‘Wow, I have to see this,’” Borys says. “They may even think it’s a photograph; it doesn’t really matter. But visual accessibility with contemporary art is critical, and I love the fact that (with) this art, you don’t need a label to understand it.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
