Born in Upstate New York, in the Finger Lakes Region, Tom Gardner has been drawing and painting for as long as he can remember. He has won awards from the National Academy of the Arts, Arnot Art Museum, Roberson Museum and American Artist Magazine among many others. Gardner has been featured in both group and solo exhibits across the nation – mainly in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, Wyoming, and Massachusetts. He has traveled broadly and paints wherever he goes. He has visited Italy, Chile, Mexico, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands and extensively across the United States, Alaska included. Gardner will just pick up his paint box and go.
He says, “I just paint.” Unpretentious, in fact, anti-pretentious, Tom Gardner is an artist full of both feeling and thought who believes that art should be accessible to everyone without explanation. Like many artists, he paints because he must. He is compelled and finds that some part of him seems broken when he cannot create daily.
Gardner has also become an established sculptor with many public works of art. He has done projects for the Federal Government (I-86 Horseheads bypass project), The Rockwell Museum (“Artemus” the bison bursting through the bricks of the Museum’s façade), “Time Melts Away” the sculpture of a melting watch installed on the second story of West End Gallery’s façade, the “Critic” the sculpture at the far West End of Market Street, as well as projects for Elmira College, Sperr Memorial Park, The ARTS of the Southern Finger Lakes, and private collectors.
Gardner describes himself as largely self-taught and he is an avid learner. After college he continued to seek opportunities to grow and he painted regularly for many years with Thomas S. Buechner and Martin Poole in Corning, New York. He has also found workshops and classes elsewhere on specific techniques to be helpful; but largely he visits galleries and museums, reads, and listens to the voice within him, more and more finding his own artistic vocabulary and vision.
“While I was considering a subject for this show, I started to wonder how my work today holds up next to paintings I did years ago. Has my composition, colors or technique changed? If so, how? For the better, I hope.
In some instances, I could see work I had done years ago that I really liked and wanted to get back to that way of delivering the paint to the canvas, to be more direct and assertive. It was a real lesson to look at an older painting and to wish that I could do that now! I thought, ‘Well then, Tom, just do it!
It’s going to be interesting to see these paintings hanging together on the same wall. I look forward to it!”