Lettie Gardiner

Galleries and Exhibitions

Delicate Nature - Burgh House, London - October 2019

The paintings at this show are not abstract but are based on something seen in the recent past or long ago. In these works, Lettie has tried to be true to the freshness of her first impressions.

Book of Small Ideas (2016)

In 2016, Lettie became interested in artist's books and completed her first book in March 2017. Pages in this book are in landscape and portrait format 31cm x 23/21cm. The medium is gouache with graphite and acrylic.

There are 20 images in the 'Book of Small Ideas' because Lettie thinks that the whole is greater than the parts and that it has a cumulative impact. Quotation from the book's front page: "The images are based on simple ideas, hence the whole is greater than the parts."

Five images

This is a little group of paintings from the past which Lettie happens to have in her possession.

Collection of trees (2015)

Lettie wanted to depict typical highveld landscapes, hence the blue gum trees. Not the glossy well-grown town variety but chopped down for firewood, regrown, scruffy, dusty trees with feeble shade on parched earth with the memories of human habitation.

People on the Edge (2011)

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.
-- Andea Dworkin

Family (2009)

These paintings are tales of desolation and fraught encounters. The spaces between the figures are painted with the same density as the figures they separate. Space seems impregnable, unable to carry a whisper or a shout.
-- Joyce Ozinski

Small Domestic Miseries (2007)

In the context of major disasters which affect people, my focus in this exhibition hints at how the apparently less significant and less spectacular actually point towards more serious violations of people's dignity than first meets the eye.

Johannesburg Art City competition (2004)

Lettie was selected as one of 20 finalists in the 2002 Johannesburg Art City competition and her entry was mounted on a giant billboard outside a shopping complex, the Oriental Plaza.

Work with the Artists’ Press (2004)

In January 2004 Lettie spent a week, by invitation, with Mark Attwood of the Artists’ Press in White River, Mpumalanga, producing lithographs.

Art on Paper Gallery Melville, Johannesburg (2002)

I painted fifty heads in all and saw them as an assemblage. Each painting of a head can stand on its own but they gain by being grouped with others. I felt no need to prescribe how or in which order the individual heads should be juxtaposed. The original drawings on the paper are of machine parts, with instructions for construction and assembly.

"I see the people whom I have painted as urban dwellers: hence the use of industrial drawing paper. The people painted are children, women and old people, both men and women, all still easily abused though protected by the Bill of Rights."

lettiegardiner.com