Tim Gardner’s watercolour vision of middle-class masculinity
Even the most art-averse have probably used watercolours. They’re less messy and labour-intensive than oils or acrylics and require only a dribble of water to come to life, which is probably why they came in so handy in childhood art lessons. But if you’re looking to create something more highbrow than a five-year-old scribble, they’re essentially impossible to work with. Too much water bubbles the paper, and if layers of paint haven’t dried properly, mixed colours turn muddied and dull. It makes the paintings Tim Gardner produced even more jaw-dropping. Realism, usually the save of oil painters, is somehow achieved in dazzling watercolour. The scenes he paints have the overexposure of digital photos, so it takes a second to realise they’re handpainted.
In the most delicate and temperamental medium of all, Gardner depicts drunken exploits. He also does dazzling landscapes, but the sentimentality of his boozy boyhood scenes is by far the most intriguing. Early in his artistic career, he tried capturing the suburban melodramas in oil but found watercolour a surprisingly good fit. “When I was doing those pictures of all those guys partying, in oil painting, it was just too over-the-top masculine,” Gardner told Canadian Art. “I like the contrast between the watercolour medium and the subject matter – kind of a good tension.”
It creates a quiet tension in that these images explore male friendship, brutal hangovers and beer bongs, but the painting itself requires such a gentle touch. “You can mess up a whole painting with one mistake,” Gardner admits. “But that’s what I like about it. That element of risk.” His work strikes a similar tone to Norman Rockwell’s but offsets the kitschy American idealism with everyday banality. There might be stunning mountain landscapes, but SUVs and liquor stores often cloud their view.
In Blackout, we have no background at all, just an impossibly realistic young man in a jacket. In Garibaldi, a stunning clear ocean opens up, but the focus is lasered in on the three men crouched on rocks drinking a beer. His work is so true to life, and his subjects so natural that it looks like an old photo.
Gardner’s art utilised that vintage touch, and even works from 2010, like Two Men Looking at a Shark, you don’t even take in the aquarium scene. Instead, it’s the minuscule details – the newspapers dangling from their pockets and the undeniably 1990s trainers.
The charm of his art meant that in the mid-2000s, he joined the likes of Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt and had his works hung in the National Gallery. At the time, he said comparisons to the Old Masters were “a bit of an awkward position to be in”, but it seems a natural conclusion to make.
Although he opted for non-traditional watercolour, his works echoed their realism and heart. Halfway between a visual journal of everyday life and a brooding mediation on masculinity, his work was probably among the most intriguing.
