Peter Gardiner

FEATURED ARTIST

Video, photography and article produced by David Griffen.

Peter Gardiner is a Newcastle painter whose practice has developed over more than four decades. Born in Geelong, he moved to Newcastle to study at art school and has remained deeply connected to the city ever since. His work reflects a long, sustained commitment to painting, shaped by years of making in studios, garages and sheds across Newcastle.

Peter Gardiner is represented by Nanda Hobbs

“dead reckoning is that sort of estimated way of navigating, whether by sea or by land”

My name is Peter Gardiner. I’m a painter. I’ve been painting now close on 40 years,, maybe a bit longer. I was born in Geelong. I moved to Newcastle to go to art school, fell in love, and I’ve never left Newcastle since. Probably for the first 20 or so years I was up here, I painted in probably about 20 different garages and sheds around town. There was a guy who came up from Sydney and started the gallery after doing a stint. His name’s David Minton he took on a few Newcastle artists he saw Newcastle as being that sort of a satellite city to Sydney. It had a strong culture there, and he wanted to make a go of it with the commercial gallery, which didn’t really work out too much for him.

But he packed up and re-established himself in Sydney, and that gave about four or five of us good exposure to the Sydney art market. I was actually awarded a travel scholarship to Barcelona for three or four months, and that was a huge change, sort of lifted by exposure, and also my exposure to the art of Europe and the West, the whole Western canon.

So I’m drawn to those big subjects in nature, fire, oceans, all those sorts of things. The thing with fires was, the thing that sparked me with fires was that I realised that it is such a large character in the landscape, and Australia’s got a big canon of landscape history, but they’re rarely painted.

I just sort of found that there was a gap there for me to paint and to explore.

So, my practice is really predicated on play and experimentation, and I spend a lot of time just mucking around.

And that’s how I learned to paint a particular way I paint. Fire was the main reason that I developed this way of putting paint on and dragging it off and using various different surfaces, from plastic to cloth to brushes to get the particular effects that I wanted.

When I left Victoria, I lived in a coastal town in 1983, and that was the Ash Wednesday fires. I literally left my hometown as it burnt.. It was burning when I left the next morning. So that was, in a way, a major change for me because I was 17, and I went from living under the roof of my parents to living by myself up here, and quite literally, my bridge was burnt.

So those subjects, fire and ocean, forests and all those sorts of things, are places that I know really well, that I know from experience. I’ve surfed through my life I’ve had a really close relationship with the beach and those sorts of things. So I kind of paint what I know, and I’ll usually paint them from my experience, not from photographs. I paint for the feel of it.

My mind wanders by, I’ll start painting at about 8:30 or so and by about 9:30, 10, I’m pretty much right in to it. And I can go through to almost the end of the day, shuffling in and out to get coffees and stuff, but there is a sort of fugue you get into like a trance.

I know from the start, for instance that this painting is going to be the ocean. And I know basically how it’s going to go, but time and the accidents and things kind of push me along and push me in various directions. With the fires, again, I have a vague idea that there’s a certain level of finish that I need to get with the fires to get a greater level of verisimilitude, more than the oceans. The oceans are probably leaning more towards the abstract. Not totally, but compared to these quite refined paintings, I think a lot of my work leans heavily into the idea of the sublime, the idea that nature is bigger than us and how we can make it feel quite significant as well.

I remember hearing a fireman saying on an ABC News thing, and the guy said it’s like a god, and he said that God is not a big enough word for it. And I thought that was really good, really interesting statement and there’s some things in nature that you can just be overwhelmed by. You could be sitting there on a surfboard, you know, ten-foot clean-ups that come through and knock you off your board, you think you’re going to drown or die. And it’s the same with other aspects of nature – so I lean into into that pretty heavily.

I find religion really interesting. I think religions are important. I don’t have a religious faith. But I’m fascinated by it, particularly, early Christian, Old Testament type stuff, if you like. The Old Testament is governed by some pretty crazy stories. It’s a sort of inherent madness in that book, and I get a lot of inspiration out of it, particularly visually, some of the things that you read about, whether it’s stories of the fiery furnace.

So the next show is Nanda Hobbs, and the title is very important. But when I was asked to give a title for it, there was a magazine that was coming out and they needed a title, and Dead Reckoning came into my head. And of course, dead reckoning is that sort of estimated way of navigating, whether by sea or by land.

And it’s kind of about how you start off with an idea of where you go based on present conditions and usually end up in a completely different place. The next day you dead reckon again, and that’s just kind of the way we move through our life.

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