A Visit to An Artist’s Studio
By Dale Jefferies
GREENSBORO - It is an uncommon experience to pay a visit to the studio of a working artist. Particularly one who’s working environment is very private, and out-of-the-way. It is an extremely enriching opportunity for a private collector and while most serious artists would balk at the idea of admitting total strangers into the “sanctum Santorum” of their creative process, J. W. Gardner welcomes the intrusion. A visit to his studio, an hours drive north of Greensboro on US 220, offers a window into the personal world of a very private painter. Situated on his family farm in Franklin County Virginia just over the Henry County line, his studio is in his house, an antebellum family home dating back to the 1840s.
My husband and I had seen Gardner’s work at a show in Eden, visited his website, and were surprised to discover that the artist freely invites collectors interested in his work and his process to visit his studio. We emailed Gardner asking to visit and the following Saturday we were standing in the cluttered upstairs studio drinking coffee and looking at a new oil painting still wet on the easel. Paintings and drawings, both old and new were stacked everywhere, thumbnails were taped to the 160 year-old fireplace mantle and the distinctive smell of oil paint filled the air.
Most art collectors that enjoy a special, ongoing relationship with the work of living artists are able to enjoy a personal dialog with the painter, but we had not even purchased a painting prior to our visit. We were fortunate in being able to carry two pieces home to Greensboro. But, to sit and to leisurely talk about art and the painting process with Gardner was a uniquely valuable experience.
The conversation ranged from color theory to canvas size. It was an opportunity to ask an artist that we both admired the all important questions of “why.”
Gardner’s new work (as of this writing), is all about the South in the 1930s. It is a very meaningful period of history for Gardner who is as much of a historian as he is a painter. “It was a revolutionary period in Southern history,” he explains. “It was a brief period where the past and future of the South collided. When an agrarian society was pushed into a capitalist economy. A time when independent farmers traded in the plow for a time-clock and a paycheck.”
Gardner does not shy away from obvious questions. He no longer does battle with post-modernism. In some ways his work simply avoids his own time entirely, and in other very significant and meaningful ways it rises above it.
Copyright © 2004, James William Gardner, All Rights Reserved
Rubberneckin' Uptown 2004
Current Series:
Images of the Depression Era South
Oil on Canvas
Detail:
Waitin' on Walter 2004
Oil on Canvas
Franklin County Studio / Gallery
4421 Virgil Goode Highway
Rocky Mount, VA 24151
