Photorealistic artist intermingles humdrum, highbrow

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/10/2023 (1043 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tim Gardner is a master of juxtaposition.

Take his 2012 pastel-on-paper work Nick and Tobi on Ferry. It’s a meticulously detailed portrait done in a classical style, the kind you might find hanging in a great hall (or, yes, in an art gallery). Except the men are dressed in baseball caps and sweatshirts, they are eating takeout out of a sauce-splattered Styrofoam clamshell container balanced on a lap, and they are sitting on the worn leather seats of public transportation.

“I just thought that was funny,” Gardner says with a smile.

That piece, along with almost 140 others, is featured in Tim Gardner: The Full Story, which opens this weekend at WAG-Qaumajuq. Curated by WAG-Qaumajuq director and CEO Stephen Borys, The Full Story is the Iowa-born, Ontario-raised artist’s first retrospective and largest solo exhibition to date, drawn from public and private collections from across North America.

“This is my first time seeing it all together,” Gardner says while sitting in the gallery, surrounded by art spanning 30 years of his career.

“It’s still sinking in. It’s really interesting to see, especially the older works. Just the ideas I was working on then, and the technique is different then, too.

“It’s kind of mind-blowing to see everything all together.”

Gardner, 50, recreates scenes based on snapshots of everyday life he takes or collects. He paints things and places, too — with watercolours he turns, hilariously, a ribfest into a breathtakingly beautiful landscape — but he began with people.

“The very beginning works were a lot about my two brothers and their friends, and all their hijinks hanging out,” he says.

His works explore a softer, more playful side of masculinity and male camaraderie. The men in Gardner’s photorealist watercolours and pastels aren’t kings, or conquerors, or gods, or war heroes, or Jesus. They’re just guys.

“The delicate medium with the masculine subject matter really appealed to me,” says Gardner, who is now based in Red Deer, Alta. “Just how the medium could kind of undermine the subject matter a little.”

It’s a tension he discovered by accident.

“Originally in art school, I was doing the same images, but on a large scale in oil paint, so it was more, I would say, aggressive towards the viewer, like a confrontational experience looking at the paintings,” says the artist. “And that wasn’t what I was going for. It was a bit too much.”

He started using watercolours as a matter of convenience; he was travelling, visiting his parents, and watercolours are portable.

“The combination of the watercolour with this snapshot imagery really clicked for me,” he says. “And it was like a new medium, too. I had never seen something like that before.”

That medium appealed to Borys as a curator, as well.

“On one level, I just love the subject matter, which is just the life of Tim, everyday life,” he says. “On the other hand, incredibly, technically profound work, these watercolors and pastels.”

It’s meaningful that Gardner’s first retrospective should happen in Winnipeg. His family moved to the city in the early ’90s when he was a high school senior, and it was in the art room at Fort Richmond Collegiate where the seeds of a career were planted.

“I had a supportive art teacher, Allan Geske, who helped me put together a portfolio for a university,” Gardner says. Some of his Fort Richmond-era still lifes are actually on view in the exhibition.

Gardner graduated with a BFA from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art in 1996 before moving to New York City to earn his MFA from Columbia University in 1999. He started showing at 303 Gallery in New York and has gone on to be featured in solo and group exhibitions all over the world.

His process hasn’t changed much over the past three decades, but technology has sped it up. In the ’90s when he was taking pictures, he was using film.

“I’d just be taking hundreds of pictures all the time and going into London Drugs or wherever and getting it all developed,” he says. “I just have these shoeboxes full of thousands of pictures in my studio.”

When the first digital cameras came out, it was revolutionary.

“I was able to see the image as soon as I took it, and you could delete an image that didn’t work, and there was no waiting around to see what you actually had a picture of,” he says.

Roy, the tree planter from Gardner’s pastel-on-paper work Roy with Red Cup — a bandana keeping his sandy-brown hair out his eyes, which are squinting in the morning sun, a stunning vista of misted mountaintops behind him as he enjoys a cup of joe — has become, literally, the poster boy for the show. Roy with Red Cup is featured on a 40-foot promotional banner suspended on the outside of the building.

“I’m hoping that someone who’s never been to the WAG drives by and says, ‘Wow, I have to see this,’” Borys says. “They may even think it’s a photograph; it doesn’t really matter. But visual accessibility with contemporary art is critical, and I love the fact that (with) this art, you don’t need a label to understand it.”

Tim Gardner: The Full Story is on view until April 7, 2024.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com