Scott Gardiner (b.1975) graduated with a Master of Visual Arts with Honours in painting from the Auckland University of Technology. He has been a multiple finalist in the Wallace Art Awards as well as the New Zealand Painting and Printmaking and Molly Morpeth Canaday Art Awards. His work has been exhibited and held in private and corporate collections throughout New Zealand, Australia and the United States including the Sir James Wallace Arts Trust.

As a dedicated surfer, Scott Gardiner’s passion for the ocean is immediately obvious in his paintings. Surfing is an intense physical interaction with the ocean’s surface. Modernist painting is an intense mental interaction with the surface of a canvas. Gardiner’s paintings spring from an intersection of the two; a distillation of the ephemeral qualities of light and motion on water rendered in pigment where the ocean is obviously a very powerful creative space for him. They are crystal-clear vessels of alchemical metamorphosis and transcendence. They change as you look at them. You can taste the salt in their sunlight.

Gardiner weaves together two co-existing universes. Often there is a naturalistic depiction of the sea, but lest we forget we are looking at a flat surface and not through a window, his is often integrated with repetitive grid-like forms that mimic light glancing off rhythmic waves like an Art Deco stained glass depiction of the sea, or girder-like structural geometries that push him into the Op Art territory of Victor Vasarely. At other times the paintings are highly abstracted, recalling the stylised surface reflections of David Hockney’s LA swimming pools or the elaborate calligraphy of Song Dynasty artist Ma Yuan’s “Water Folio”.

To these works there is an almost decorative quality, like the bright tiles and intricate arabesques of the Muslim east and Orientalist depictions of it. Geometry, evolving out of earlier Gardiner motifs of motorways and overpasses, reflects an impulse to fixed order and control projected onto the chaotic, fractal and ever evolving organic forms of nature. 

This new work reflects that closeness to the great unknown, the struggle for life. It manifests in a far greater depth in the work, highlighting the already present references to human mortality in the counterpoints of light and dark, gloss and matt, naturalistic and abstract. The intense blues in this new work are not merely the mirror of the ocean reflecting the sky. Blue is also the colour of celestial realm and higher orders of cosmic truth, the sapphire pavement of the Empyrean, the vertiginous blue of Sublime infinity. Each painting is an abstract philosophical exercise as well as an extremely beautiful and engaging aesthetic object. Each a self-contained idea, and also a process, a continuum of thought and experience.

Dr Andrew Paul Wood is an art and cultural historian, writer, educator, broadcaster, and translator based in Christchurch, New Zealand.