Jeremy Gardiner: South by Southwest (SIGNED BY THE ARTIST)

South by Southwest portrays the stretch of coast from Ilfracombe in North Devon to St Margaret’s Bay in Kent, through the unique vision of landscape painter Jeremy Gardiner. In this latest series of paintings, created over the past five years, Gardiner demonstrates an acute sense of his place in history, and the history of place: the geology, maritime history and industrial heritage of this constantly evolving coast, a shoreline that has long held a fascination for British artists.

Gardiner’s points of reference range from 19th-century landscape painting to Shell posters, from the St Ives modernists to picture postcards. Each offers a key to a view, over which Gardiner layers his own memory of a place, accumulated through time, changing light and weather. Capturing the hidden structures and movement of landscape, as well as the detail of harbours, piers and lighthouses, his paintings are specific though never insular.

Alongside these paintings, four essays, examine the context and innovative approach of Gardiner’s recent work on panel and paper, rarely and enviably sensitive to the spirit of Britain’s southern coastline.