Thursday, Oct. 25, 2001 | 8:13 a.m.
Stand close to a Tim Gardner watercolor painting and you will notice the fine details and bright colors of the landscape and the subtle texture of a suntanned arm.
Step back a couple of feet from the painting and a picture-perfect snapshot of young men at play comes into stunning focus.
After graduating from graduate school only two years ago, and with two one-man shows in his home state of New York under his belt, the 29-year-old Gardner has made a splash with his paintings of banal scenes from the streets of the United States.
His watercolors are collected by such celebrities as former tennis star John McEnroe and Hollywood executive Michael Ovitz. Rolling Stone magazine and the Village Voice newspaper in New York have reviewed his work and both called him an artist to watch.
A 28-piece exhibition of Gardner's detailed watercolor paintings inspired by family photographs is on display through Nov. 10 at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery.
The simple gestures of people's everyday environment forms Gardner's development as an artist, he said from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lives with his wife, Veronica.
His works, such as "Untitled (Nick and Matt with Mirrors, Las Vegas)," are scenes that are similar to pictures most people may have tucked in photo albums of vacations, teenagers growing into and out of their wild youth, holidays and hikes.
For Gardner, the paintings reflect snapshots of other people's lives: young men posing with a wall of empty bottles of beer; the exterior of a dimly lit home with decorative Christmas bulbs hanging from the roof; smiling hikers relaxing under a winter sun.
"My work deals with the theme of escapism, (such as) post-adolescent guys getting drunk in this relentless pursuit of oblivion, escaping the banality of their everyday environment," Gardner said. "I paint escapism."
The artist rarely depicts himself in his paintings. When he does, it's as a figure in the distance.
In "Self-Portrait: The Hi-Line Trail," Gardner appears as a tiny focal point hiking through a green meadow surrounded by an expanse of brown, craggy mountains in Montana.
"The self-portrait is me in the landscape and that's what my work is about, those kinds of escapism things, tourist sites," Gardner said. "(They are) pretty simple photos."
Rolling Stone art critic Mim Udovitch wrote in a September 2000 review that Gardner was a rising contemporary artist.
"For anyone who knows the aimless social pleasures of the Taco Bell drive-through, drinking beer, (urinating) from hotel balconies at the beach and giving the police the finger, any suburban American male that is, Canadian artist Tim Gardner's meticulous, beautiful watercolors will strike a chord of recognition.
"Gardner's paintings for the most part show the same group of friends and relatives drinking, (urinating), puking and generally cavorting against a variety of backdrops, from Cancun to the backyard swimming pools of suburban Canada."
Gardner's Las Vegas exhibit was pulled together from the 303 Gallery in New York, which represents Gardner, as well as private collectors in New York and Los Angeles by Libby Lumpkin, assistant curator of UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery.
Lumpkin had seen Gardner's artwork at the 303 Gallery in 1999 and watched his growth as an artist. She began to arrange a Las Vegas exhibit earlier this year. When she inquired about a Las Vegas show, the gallery owners were surprised and excited.
Gardner recently was invited to include his paintings in art shows in Sweden and London, but had yet to have his work featured in a solo show outside of New York.
Lumpkin was able to handpick the pieces she wanted for the Beam gallery exhibit from the 303 Gallery and the private collections of McEnroe and Ovitz.
She selected Gardner's Las Vegas-themed artwork, as well as older pieces that the young artist had completed right out of graduate school at Columbia University in New York.
For Gardner, who visited Las Vegas for the first time Oct. 4 to open the Beam exhibit, the photos he uses as inspiration are a snapshot of America on vacation.
His Las Vegas paintings were copied in small strokes of pigment and water from photographs that were passed along to him by vacationing family members and friends.
From those snapshots he painted "Untitled (S in Vegas)," a painting of a jacketed man with arms spread wide in front of the Flamingo Las Vegas marquee, and "Untitled (Val and Flamingos)," a friend mooning over two bird sculptures.
When Gardner came to Las Vegas, one of his first stops was the pink-and-purple neon sign he had painted with meticulous detail, but had never seen.
"It was a big deal to see the sign (at the Flamingo Las Vegas) for the first time because it took on more of a mythic proportion that I'd seen through the pictures from friends I'd painted," Gardner said. "By the time I got there (to the hotel-casino) I was excited to finally see it. It was a good moment. I took pictures."
Lumpkin asked McEnroe and Ovitz to loan their pieces, six in all, to show the extent of Gardner's brief career.
McEnroe bought works from Gardner's first New York show in 1999, "Untitled, (S asleep in flowers)," and "Untitled, (Self-portrait, Baralachal La, India)." Ovitz recently began to collect Gardner's paintings and owns four, including "Untitled (Nick and Matt with mirror, Las Vegas)."
"It shows the full range of what he'd been doing," Lumpkin said of the show. "It's the full breadth of his short career."
Gardner grew up in Canada, with his teenage years spent in frosty Winnipeg, Ontario, where his family moved in 1991 from Toronto.
As a respite from social pressures, Gardner began to express himself on canvas.
He turned to reproducing snapshots of his friends, brothers and his brothers' friends whooping it up while he hunkered down in his room honing his painting skills.
He practiced strokes with watercolors and moved to oils on canvas, but soon tired of pushing the oil around with his brushes, he said. He couldn't achieve the detail with oil that he could with watercolor, he said, and so returned to the medium for its sense of immediacy and delicate strokes.
"When you apply the paint to the paper there is a tendency of the watercolor to do its own thing," Gardner said. "It's too late to manipulate it much once the water is soaking into the paint and the pigment is drying. It has a mind of its own."
Gardner is adjusting to his newfound fame, but slowly.
"It's unsettling," he said. "People recognize me, and they like me. It can go the other way, too. If someone really hated my work, they could look down on me."
The shows in New York at the 303 Gallery and the Beam exhibit allow him to work full time on his watercolors, as well as travel.
"I'm looking for ways to express things differently that are a different subject matter (than the past)," he said. "I'm just trying to grow."
He plans to stick with the watercolor medium but move to painting more landscapes.
"I'm painting what I know, basically," Gardner said. "My career has been pretty short, so far. I'm still developing."
The developments will continue to be a picture-perfect reflection of life through his eyes, he said, and that of his friends' cameras.
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