Biography
Ian Gardner (b. Lancaster, UK 1944 - d. Lancaster 2019) studied at Lancaster and Nottingham art schools. He taught printmaking in the School of Art and Design at Bradford College, where together with Patrick Eyres and Grahame Jones, he launched the New Arcadian Press in 1981, before later being dedicated to watercolour landscape painting, especially admiring the work of John Sell Cotman (1782-1842).
Gardner created paintings that ranged in size from the postage stamp to the mural. His monumental and panoramic tendencies were spurred on by his experience of landscapes in the United States where, during 1987-88, he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a prize-winner in the Young Contemporaries and the Lansing Landscape Competition and received awards from the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, the United States Library of Congress and the Arts Council of Great Britain. Since 1965, Gardner had participated in at least thirty-six group exhibitions, including the eighteen organised by the New Arcadian Press during its first decade, and has enjoyed twenty-two solo exhibitions, nine of which were in London galleries. His paintings were championed by the art critic Edward Lucie-Smith and have been bought for at least twenty-five commercial and institutional collections throughout Britain, including the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Houses of Parliament and Chatsworth House, as well as the Getty Foundation in California. The Topiary Garden, Levens Hall, Kendal (from the series Pairidaeza), 1973, the lithographic prints of which were published in association with the American poet Jonathan Williams (1929-2008), was purchased for the Contemporary Art Society and donated to Bury Museum.
