Tom Gardner

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, Elmira College, Sperr Memorial Park, The ARTS of the Southern Finger Lakes as well as for 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.