simonandpennygardiner@orange.fr

About Penny

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Pictures & Paintings 2

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Travel Writer and humourist George East and his wife Donella are friends and near neighbours to Penny. George also shares her passion for the work of Van Gogh.

"I first became aware of Vincent and his work when I was in Paris on a school exchange trip many, many years ago," he says. "From that moment, I became almost obsessed with him, his work and life and relationships. There is perhaps a tenuous link with the great man here as his friend (and often sparring partner!) Gauguin is said to have painted the lake at nearby Huelgoat from the attic of what is now an art gallery in that pretty little Breton town. Gauguin also lived and worked in Pont Aven, where he gave up Impressionism to work out a new theory called 'Synthetism'. But my biggest link to Vincent Van Gogh is Penny Gardiner. Not only do we share an unquenchable passion for him and his work, but I can see the same sort of questioning vibrancy and even courage in her work. I know she would blush deeply at any such comparisons, but if a true lust for understanding all aspects of creative painting and life itself is a qualification, Penny is a true inheritor of the great man and his contribution to modern art..."

Travel Writer and humourist George East

Journalist and translator Wilhelmina Van der Veer writes

"Since my first visit - in the late nineties  to the Art  and media Centre in  Zundert, NL. where I attended the opening of an exhibition of paintings by Penny Gardiner, I was struck time and again by the artist’s bright and vivid colours.

Her colouration, which explains her predilection for the 19th Century Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, is just another feature of her art; it is the very ‘hall mark’, I think, of her Oeuvre. Hence its appeal to the eye of the observer.

Penny Gardiner is a natural painter, as well as a driven one. She uses a variety of styles, ranging from bold brush strokes to dainty dabs of delicate brushwork.

In all periods, of course, art has represented reality, but these are fundamental differences between what in different epochs, has been considered real.

I believe that Penny Gardiner's paintings are real in the same sense that her abstract and her figurative work appeal to more than the eye only. Her paintings invite us not just to look, but to SEE and to wake up to the secrets of an inspired artist’s colourful reality."