Natural Selection

When Nietzsche wrote that the sky filled him with consternation, he wasn't kidding. Unless you live in a cave, it's the only part of the natural world that is unavoidable. Part psychedelic canopy, part exalted metaphor, it's a ubiquitous reminder of what a minuscule detail you are in the big picture. A thin skin between the limits of the physical world and the possibilities of an abstract one, whoever or whatever is responsible for the sky's creation was undoubtedly the best artist ever. Just imagine making something so great, so indescribable, that the various peoples of the planet have never tired of talking about it, singing praises to it, representing it, hurtling into it.

But despite its leading actor status, the sky still looks good, and no less enigmatic, playing supporting role to some other strong and silent type - mountains or oceans or plains, for example. Get them together, and there's no end to their suggestive possibilities; they're a head-turning cast enacting an infinite, improvised script. Ultimately, however, the great outdoors is as blank as it may be beautiful. After centuries of trying to work out what the 'natural world' means to us, do we really feel any closer to it? As Woody Allen once remarked, he's 'at two' with nature.

If it could laugh, nature would roar at our paltry attempts to formalise our relationship with it through representation - images separated from their subject, but struggling to effect a reconciliation before the paint dries. If painting is simply another way of making an experience concrete, it also, in a very real sense, negates the intense of-the-moment quality that exemplifies the great outdoors - you can never step into the same river twice. This is a conundrum central to art's relationship to the natural world. Which is perhaps why pictures that ostensibly appear to be saying something about nature are usually more voluble on the subject of people and culture. (You think Caspar David Friedrich made paintings about mountains?)

Make a self-portrait of yourself as a young man in the wild, and you're asking for it. Consider your precursors: 600 years of really good artists and writers grappling with the natural world and the complexity of our relationship with it. Make a quiet watercolour of a boy playing in snow, or walking through a forest glade, or going for a swim with some friends on a hot day, and you'll find yourself, without your permission, dragged into the ring with the heavyweights. Which is what is so appealing about Tim Gardner's watercolours of teenage boys hiking through woods or across plains, snow-boarding, partying with the guys and swimming in Arcadian pools. He doesn't seem to want to argue with anyone. He treats mountains and forests and the sky with the same kind of fumbling intimacy you might reserve for a rather aloof best friend - one who never tells you anything, but who likes showing you their wardrobe. His pictures are appealing, slightly clumsy things that look like casually rendered copies of snapshots. Nonetheless, they remind you that cobwebbed words like 'harmony', 'balance', 'tone', 'colour' and 'line' still serve some purpose - to create an image that's easy on the eye. Which is not to say that his pictures are ineffectual. They're quiet, their subjects are unremarkable, they're self-absorbed without being tiresomely narcissistic, they don't play intellectual tricks and they're not trying to convince you of anything. Which, in this day and age, is tantamount to a series of seriously radical gestures.

Gardner's pictures initially look pretty conservative - after all, they revolve around white, middle-class boys having fun in places that don't look exactly deprived. Look more closely, however, and the relationships he describes become a little more complicated. Gardner, who is often the boy in the picture, seems to paint the same picture repeatedly. The locations and people may shift, but certain characteristics seldom change: mainly, that the boys rarely cease looking out from the picture at the viewer looking at them, as if reiterating that their very physical presence is central to an understanding of the image. Touched with a discreet, kind of Protestant eroticism, their unblinking scrutiny lends the pictures an equivocal, questioning air. The perennial tension between appearance and content - you can see what's happening, but what's really happening? - becomes more and more apparent. The expression on their faces suggests that they're not so much concerned with the things you tend to associate with pictures of nature - God, the sublime, urban colonising of the 'natural' world - but about what it means to be voraciously young and to feel yourself getting older, as dwarfed by the weight of anticipation as you are by the enormity of the natural world, or the intimacy of your private one. The size of the sky and the mute landscape become metaphorical sites of solace and unknowingness - solace in the sense that a landscape never bugs you about your future.

The blankness of the landscape makes it an apt location for the picturing of adolescence. The boys are painted in the same way as inanimate things - as if they're no less ordinary or more mysterious than the sky or a tree or a shirt. The watercolour is applied so vividly, and with such keen naturalism, that beneath the scent of pine needles you can almost smell the chewing gum on the boys' breath and the cigarette smoke on their clothes. Wherever they are, they seem at home, but in the way that adolescents usually do - restless, self-conscious, isolated. (If they make you feel a little excluded, well, most things and most people do, don't they?) Occasionally the pictures show much younger children with an older man, presumably a father. Women are nowhere to be found - this is a male domain; it's about growing up male surrounded by other males, in rugged places where they can prove their athleticism, their lack of fear. But despite this abundance of testosterone, the pictures express a marked lack of bravado. If anything, the boys emanate a slightly lost, even quizzical air; one that - despite the fun that everyone seems to be having - seems to suggest a gentle wondering about what they are doing there at all.

The artist's self-portraits invariably show him standing alone, in the classic central position of the tourist, in front of something impressive - for example the Athabasca Glacier in Canada, the Rhotang Pass in India, or the Taj Mahal (one of the few pictures of monuments). They reek of the family album, with a nostalgia for a certain point in time; about travelling as a rite of passage, when you're filled with such a restlessness and intense physicality you don't know what to do with your limbs. The watercolours, like lovingly rendered aide-memoires, become, with their curious atmosphere of displacement and sentimentality, as elegiac as photographs, and as decorative and permanent as tattoos.

Which is not to negate their utter appropriateness as watercolours - it's a singularly expressive medium. Long used for topographical drawing, it is peculiarly suitable for registering the pauses in a journey. Its intrinsic delicacy lends a certain melancholy aspect, as if the thin, bleeding pigment reflects the effect of memory constantly seeping into the present. Gardner's paintings - a tonic to jaded urban eyes - may exude the expendable quality of the snapshot, but rendering them in watercolour lends them a concentration the original lacked. The artist may be re-presenting his youth to us, but it's a youth he's scrutinised every available visible centimetre of; as if by analysing the surface of his memories he'll understand what lies at the heart of them. That it's a futile endeavour - the past always holds too many stories to ever understand - doesn't really matter. It only ever will if people stop trying.