Constructed Landscape Scenes
By Cristina Gardiner
Original artworks
Oil on canvas/oil on board
Framed (two only)
Image sizes in order as shown above:
After the Sun Comes Out - H: 92cm x W: 62cm - (unframed) £645
The Street - H: 92cm x W: 62cm - (unframed) £645
Winter Walk I - H: 50cm x W: 59cm (framed) £495
Winter Walk II - H: 50cm x W: 59cm (framed) £495
Former architect, now painter, Cristina, has developed a Postmodernist style all of her own. And then, more recently, she has realised it echoes the photographic work of esteemed Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) and his portraits of buildings and constructed scenes.
Whether it's a complex urban scene or a rural terrain, she plays with perspective, vanishing points and the montage-style layering of surfaces, colours, patterns and angles to construct a view and to juggle with abstracted shapes and contours derived from the landscape. The result is a human-built world, merging surreal, imagined forms with real, engineered elements.
"Like Ghirri, I use screens to delineate the landscape and emphasise the double nature of what is seen and what I perceive: screens create a distance whilst proposing a meaningful relationship. With the screens, I am presenting my own vision, the interface between the here and there and presence and absence. The representation becomes fluid and full of complexities.
"The screens depict nature whilst at the same time obfuscating the overall landscape: they belong to my vision, my emotional understanding of a place and offer the viewer mysterious and different possibilities.
ABOUT CRISTINA GARDINER
Cristina grew up in Florence where she studied Art to graduate level, then architecture in Birmingham and Conservation of Historic Buildings at Bath University. She worked as a conservation architect in the Midlands before dedicating herself to painting and printing.
"I am a ‘landscape’ artist and my work varies from surreal urban mash-ups to large scale abstractions, all born from strong emotions in response to place.
"My view is that the ‘natural world’ is hardly ever an untouched concept. The philosophical and ‘immanent’ essence of a place with histories, intangible heritage, quality of space, light, colour, dynamism, and the countless way they interact, shape the emotional spirit of a place; these are all matters that influence my approach.
"In the studio, I re-imagine the essence of what captured my attention. My reinventions provide further questions, an ambiguity as an opportunity for reflection which I can offer the viewer."
She works in series, from ideas to families of finished work: "I believe that dialogue between the pieces inform one another and provide continuity as they all draw on my architectural experience, my Italian origins and my sense of belonging here in the UK."
She paints mainly with oils but also works outside with charcoal, watercolours or inks.