Addy Gardner

Our Journey Up The Mountain

I Found My Way Back Alone

Swallowing Water

Along By the River, Deep In Thought

Learning to Trust the DIfference II

The Blue Fields of Heaven

In anticipation of the first day of your life

The Real Contours of Our Feelings

But her heart is gold 2013

The memory of the moment we first met III

Hawkshead I

Through the layers of mist

Where his heart shone

Last Light I

Your love for her

Breathing ourselves out and beyond, 2014

**ADDY GARDNER showing at CAREY BLYTH **

8 Woodstock Road OX2 6HT (Tues-Sat 11-5 pm)

June 2021 : New work showing1 ‘Pen y Pass’ oil on canvas 90 x 120 cm and more…

January 2020

ADDY GARDNER

Essentially Addy Gardner’s paintings are autobiographical, reflecting her thoughts and preoccupations which morph into compositions capturing the drama of darker moments and lighter dawns of realisation, a sense of self and ‘peak experience’.

‘A World Of Our Own’ is such a painting with all the joy and inflections of mood that colour the landscape of the Welsh Mountains, and the promise of the valley beyond. Inspired by De Kooning, Addy has infused her paintings with a rigour and dynamic that is at the heart of the landscape. ‘A Journey Of Our Own’ and ‘I Found My Way Back Alone’ are the artist’s response to walking in Snowdonia. Off the well-trodden path to the summit of Snowdon, hidden away, lies The Blue Lake. Glacial blue water cascades into an old quarry, coloured by the stones beneath. The mountains on each side shape its path spilling crimson and cyan into high skies.

Abstract expressionism in Addy’s work treads a fine line with figuration as land meets sky, affording us an insight into the artist’s journey whilst inviting us to explore our own path.

‘Along By The Willows, Deep In Thought ‘ is the artist’s response to walking by the River Windrush in Oxfordshire. Winter is not yet over, but there is a promise of Spring and new beginnings in the cool blues and whites of the sky fresh against the earthier tones of the land, and the dance of the willow branches whipping in the wind. (Jenny Blyth, 2020)

Addy Gardner : ‘My paintings are born from an emotional response to places I visit and views that I witness in my day to day life. Outwardly they relate to different light and colour in the landscape. I then relate these to inward feelings and memories and things which are currently going on in my life. Sometimes also the history of a place and a feeling about a place will have an effect on the painting. All of them are about beauty in the landscape and moments where this beauty affects us.

I started to become interested in the work of De Kooning a year or so ago. I had experienced one of his paintings in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice some years back and I cannot put into words how it made me feel, other than that I felt like it had hit me in the chest and brought me to my knees. I wanted to explore the way in which De Kooning put together colours, texture and line, that allowed me as viewer to feel elated as the eye danced across the painting exploring the landscape.’

Addy Gardner trained in Psychology before studying Fine Art, and it is the combination of the two that distinguishes her abstracted landscapes from so many others.

MAY - JUNE 2019 : TOUCHING THE EARTH

Paintings by Addy Gardner and Sculpture by Martin Smith, curated by Jenny Blyth at North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford

**Touching The Earth **marks the moment where these two artists meet - a point of balance where the intangible meets substance. Both artists delight in the earthiness of an organic sense of form whilst celebrating an ethereal ambivalence.

Addy Gardner studied Psychology before committing to Fine Art twenty years ago. Her genre is abstracted landscape, popular with landscape painters but Gardner distinguishes her work through an experiential journey that reflects the scene before her, entwined with memories and thoughts evoked by the beauty she finds in the landscape. ‘Peak Experience’ has been her goal, and that moment of ‘ah-ness’ the pivotal point for her compositions. Drawing inspiration from the landscape of the Windrush Valley and woodlands, her work is about her life and relationships – historical, and of the moment.

Addy Gardner’s collection of new paintings marks a departure from safer territory that she knows works well for her, towards fresh pastures and new horizons, a journey that every painter must make. This makes for exciting viewing for us as we share her journey and spirit of adventure.

When talking about sculpture, Martin Smith enthuses about jazz with equal passion. Transported by iconic trumpeters and saxophonists from Miles Davis to Ben Webster, he describes an alchemy of easy liberation where music, mellifluous and light, ‘comes through them like breath’, and how that process of synesthesia for him is expressed through sculpture, ‘the breath of stone’. Patterns of sound and shape are transposed, so that the language of marble and alabaster is alchemized into sculpture.

The beauty of Smith’s chosen stone is in the degree of opacity and tone, ranging from the deep brown agate alabasters of Touching the Earth, to the rare and translucent Volterra ivories of Lock Stones that are soft to the touch and warm when lit from behind.

SKYFALL : Paintings & Drawings by ADDY GARDNER curated by Jenny Blyth Fine Art at Art Jericho, Oxford

**DECEMBER 2016 **

Addy Gardner, Oxfordshire artist, trained in both Fine Art and Applied Psychology. Sixteen years ago she declined the offer of an MA in Fine Art and set off to Edinburgh where she set up her studio inspired by the beauty of Scottish landscape. She returned to Oxfordshire in 2004.

For those of you who know her work, you will find that Addy has moved on from what you might expect. She is painting beautiful and complex landscapes composed of layers of oil paint which individually retain both substance and translucency. The effect is to capture the fluidity of the firmament - sunlight spilling through clouds, earth and sky bathed in luminosity. Her subject is the landscape that she encounters around her which she recreates in the studio as photographic panoramic ‘sketches’. From that visual reference point, Addy creates paintings that echo her memories, thoughts, dreams and emotions – moments of ‘peak experience’. There is a strong autobiographical element in her work that colours her compositions with titles such as “The memory of the moment we first met”. An artist invites us to share their journey, yet the success of a painting is also determined by their ability to invite us to make our own. Addy Gardner is chasing beauty, and is successful on both counts.

JBFA showed Addy Gardner at London Art Fair in January 2013 and at Affordable Art Fair Battersea in October 2013.

THE PAST WE HAVE SHARED : ADDY GARDNER September 2011

JBFA at Gallery 27 Cork St London W1

EARTH & SKY : ADDY GARDNER December 2010 – January 2011

JBFA at Art Jericho.

The sublime is that which we cannot appropriate, if only because we cannot discern any boundaries. If anything, it appropriates us . . . Malcolm Andrews

Moving seamlessly between configuration and abstract expressionism, Addy Gardner invites the viewer to journey between an earthly landscape and a canvas of dreams. Her painting aspires to ‘Peak Experience’ where the viewer releases their sense of self, to an awareness of a greater unity. Gardner commands an ability to create form, transforming the colours of earth and sky to a spectrum of light and ambivalence. Working in oil on canvas, Addy Gardner’s paintings are infused with vitality, imparting energy and a sense of joy.

My paintings draw on the tradition of the picturesque and sublime. They are a representation of the point at which beauty emerges in the natural world. Addy Gardner.