CHAR GARDNER
All my life I have been a maker of marks. As a child, I remember penciling lines in the margins of books, drawing with crayons on shirt cardboards and the flimsy newsprint handed out in elementary school.
I remember one drawing when I was seven. We were told to copy flowers from photographs in books, on sheets of brown wrapping paper too big for our desks. I knelt on the rough wooden floor with my paper. The teacher brought out a cookie tin filled not with crayons, but dusty broken pieces of artist pastels. Some nubbins were almost too small to grasp, yet all of them brought forth brilliant color, unlike any Crayola. My flower was a jack-in-the-pulpit. Luscious shades of green and a purple dark enough to be black. I remember crawling on that paper, utterly immersed in the experience of line and color.
These days I work with creamy oil paint bars on heavy handmade rag paper. I smear and mix colors with my fingers. Images are derived from the human form and the natural environment surrounding me in the Green Mountains of Vermont. My intention is experiential, the result unpredicted.
I remember one drawing when I was seven. We were told to copy flowers from photographs in books, on sheets of brown wrapping paper too big for our desks. I knelt on the rough wooden floor with my paper. The teacher brought out a cookie tin filled not with crayons, but dusty broken pieces of artist pastels. Some nubbins were almost too small to grasp, yet all of them brought forth brilliant color, unlike any Crayola. My flower was a jack-in-the-pulpit. Luscious shades of green and a purple dark enough to be black. I remember crawling on that paper, utterly immersed in the experience of line and color.
These days I work with creamy oil paint bars on heavy handmade rag paper. I smear and mix colors with my fingers. Images are derived from the human form and the natural environment surrounding me in the Green Mountains of Vermont. My intention is experiential, the result unpredicted.
