The Aviation Art of Gerome Gardiner
Welcome to AIRLINERART. I hope visiting my site will give you a great deal of pleasure to learn about my art and to share with you my love of Aviation.
Ever since I was young I have always loved Aeroplanes – and in this I know I’m not alone. Every time I saw a plane when I was young I would be transfixed in awe and wonder, enamored by its beautiful design and intrigued by its magical capability to fly, and to date I’m unchanged in this regard.
There is no pursuit quite like like Aviation that captures the essence of human endeavor and that unites the human race across previously insuperable boundaries. Aviation transports us to another place – both literally and metaphorically; challenging our perception of our world and the space beyond, urging us to fly faster, higher and longer, and teaching us about ourselves and our fellow human beings. Above all Aviation shows us the beauty and importance of this precious place we call home (planet earth) giving us a perspective from a vantage point on high that until a little over 100 years ago, was all but impossible.
For this reason my art is so much about the background and the landscape, as it is about Airliners. From sprawling cityscapes and bustling metropolises to vast tracts of vibrant land and sea, magestic mountain ranges and towering cloudscapes, these are the great canvases against which we as human beings paint the color our lives. They are the sublime background to our human experience and they inspire me to tell their varied and bountiful stories.
The artistry of color and design have been always part of aviation, and in particular Airliners, since their first inception in the early part of the 20th Century. The myriad color schemes, font styles and languages all speak of the vast array of cultures from across this expansive but shrinking planet, and in conjunction with the diversity of the earths glorious and ever changing landscape, they all have their stories to tell.
The process of producing an original Airlinerart oil on Canvas painting.
Each original oil on canvas painting is the result of a meticulous process of research and painstaking application to achieve the most realistic recreation possible of an Aircraft in flight.
The process begins with researching the aircrafts flight path from a particular city or airport most notably associated with the operation of the aircraft. Many resources including pilot departure plates and google earth as well as flight tracking apps are employed to accurately plot a true position for the aircraft with relation to its course and surrounding terrain, and all possible angles from which the aircraft can be viewed in flight while allowing for an informative and interesting view of the background are considered. Every aspect of the composition is analysed for its accuracy and aesthetics, including weather and lighting conditions.
Finally a particular vantage point is determined and the design of the composition is applied to the canvas firstly in the form of a basic outline.
From there the painting is built up in several layers starting with a red wash layer. This red wash technique can be traced back to the old masters and is used for a variety of reasons in my paintings which included sealing the base drawing, it also acts as a base tone giving rich body to subsequent layers of paint and it necessitates that all areas of the canvas are painted to their fullest extent.
The result of all of this I hope are paintings which not only offer an accurate technical depiction of a given aircraft but also tell a story of where it’s from and where it might be headed.