Gardner’s prosaic red cup runneth over

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This article was published 06/03/2024 (588 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In our new monthly series, A Closer Look, Free Press contributor Alison Gillmor will look at a work of visual art. Examining everything from historical oil paintings to contemporary videos, she’ll ask what these artworks can tell us now, about our lives and our world.

WHAT IT IS: Tim Gardner’s Roy with Red Cup (2012) is a pastel-on-paper work currently on view at WAG-Qaumajuq as part of a retrospective exhibition, Tim Gardner: The Full Story.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Gardner often works from photographs of family and friends. He depicts young men drinking, hanging out, goofing off. He looks at his brothers and parents through family snaps, studio portraits and slightly stiff grad pics. He calls up the routine worlds of suburban strip malls, pet stores and doughnut shops.

The source material is grounded in the ordinary and everyday, but through the alchemy of Gardner’s careful, detailed, time-intensive process, it takes on a subtle poetry.

In this work, Roy, a tree planter, is holding his morning coffee. His clothes, the plaid shirt picking up the red of the cup, are layered against the morning chill. There might be a pack of smokes in his breast pocket.

He gazes to the left, squinting a bit toward the sun that hits that side of his face. The Canadian Rockies spread out behind him, a misted, magnificent landscape that we see but he does not.

Gardner was born in Iowa and raised mostly in Canada, coming to Winnipeg in high school and graduating from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art. The 51-year-old artist, now based in Red Deer, Alta., has become known for working in the tricky terrain between the casual contemporary snapshot and the elevated high-art tradition of portrait, landscape and still-life painting.

Many of his works reference centuries of European landscapes with grand vistas of mountains, hills and water, but they’re often complicated a little with the modern markers of highways, hydro lines and SUVs.

As well, while many photorealist artists work in oil or acrylic, which gives their works a hard, shiny, assertive presence, Gardner prefers to use the softer, subtler mediums of pastel and watercolour.

Considered fragile and ephemeral, these mediums have historically been gendered — and sometimes dismissed — as “feminine.”

It’s interesting, then, that Gardner often uses pastel to explore “the idea of masculinity,” as he has said, including this rather tender portrait of what seems like a stoic, self-contained, plaid-shirted guy.

WHY IT MATTERS: When this image is reproduced, say, in a newspaper or online, it could easily be mistaken for a photograph, much like the hundreds of digital images that most of us scroll through every day on our phones or computers.

Gardner’s piece intrigues us partly because we want to see how it is different from its photographic source.

We search for evidence that this is a surface drawn and coloured by pastel. We look for traces of the artist’s hand, maybe in the blur of the distant trees or the glint of light on the coffee mug, which might testify to Gardner’s painstaking process.

The gallery experience adds another layer. On the wall, this work is clearly bigger than a standard photograph — 106 by 91 centimetres — but it still operates at a quiet, intimate human scale.

As our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by photographic images, often whirled into a hyper-accelerated, supersaturated, flattened-out gut of digital representation, Roy with Red Cup, like all of Gardner’s work, asks us to slow down, to concentrate and to look again.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca