Vivienne Gardner is a painter, sculptor, mosaicist and muralist, but has won the most acclaim for her stained-glass art.
Gardner was a student at New York’s prestigious Cooper Union in the 1950s when she made her first stained glass windows for Bermuda’s Anglican Cathedral and has gone on to create windows of exquisite beauty for many churches.
While Biblical themes are central to her church windows, she makes stained glass art for both sacred and secular settings, usually private homes. Whatever the setting, the mix of light with brilliant colour evokes a sense of the spiritual.
Although Gardner wasn’t exactly born with a paintbrush in her hand, she has been an artist for as long as she can remember and can trace art in her family genes back to the 1600s. Her artistic forbears include her grandfather William Parkinson, a book illustrator, and her grandmother Florence Parkinson, an oil painter.
The younger of two daughters, Gardner (nee Vivienne Gilmore) was born in England to an American father and an English mother. Her parents encouraged the artistic leanings that their precocious daughter displayed from the age of two.
The family spent their summers in Florence, where they owned a villa with a chapel whose stained-glass windows captivated Gardner as a child. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the family moved to Bermuda. Gardner became a student at the Bermuda High School for Girls (BHS), where her proclivity for art made her something of an oddball.
Art was not on the curriculum, but she spent much of her free time at school drawing in her exercise books. At home, and undeterred by wartime shortages, she kept busy making toys from anything she could ferret: cellophane wrappers, fabric remnants and pieces of glass she found on the beach.
Gardner graduated from BHS in 1947, with no plans for continuing with her education beyond high school. Her older sister had married and moved abroad and her parents, she said, were not particularly keen to lose their second daughter as well. Then, she took a sculpture class with Byllee Lang, a Canadian sculptor who moved to Bermuda in 1946 and would have a major impact on the Island’s arts scene.
Gardner was one of her first students and then became one of her assistants at A.S. Cooper’s, where Lang designed the store’s windows as well as the floats for the annual Floral Pageant.
Gardner “was into the big stuff” as a Lang student, and she began making larger works that took over the family home on Harbour Road, Paget. Her father built a studio on the property and installed a fireplace at his daughter’s request. The studio, which Gardner helped build, has served as her workspace ever since.
Meanwhile, Lang, who was an evangelist for art, recognised Gardner’s innate gifts and encouraged her to apply to Cooper Union School of Art, where tuition was free for anyone talented enough to gain acceptance.
It took some prodding, but Gardner followed Lang’s advice and was admitted. The move in 1953 from the cultural backwater of Bermuda to the then seedy but vibrant East Village was a major culture shock. It was also artistically liberating.
The impetus for her work in stained glass came with the demolition of a building, the Bible House, in the neighbourhood.
Gardner is an admitted scavenger—she has collected cast-off items all her life and turned them into art.
She found discarded stained glass panels from the Bible House on a sidewalk, and “squirreled them on the plane to Bermuda” when she came home on holiday.
Using the stained-glass panels and coloured glass bottles, she created two windows, one depicting the Star of Bethlehem, and the other, the Cross of Calvary, to replace two “boring little windows” over the north and south doors of the Anglican Cathedral.
Gardner was and still is a parishioner at the Cathedral and sings in the choir. Five decades later, the windows are still there.
Gardner, who was at Cooper Union from 1953 to 1956, turned down an offer to teach calligraphy at a fashion school in New York to return to Bermuda, where she had met her future husband, architect James Gardner.
The two worked on their first project together, a mosaic mural, for a mutual friend. They married, set up home on the family property and had two sons and a daughter. The couple often spent their evenings working side by side in Gardner’s studio, where James Gardner had set up his drawing board.
Her first commissions were large murals, some mosaics, others bas-relief sculptures. She also assisted Lang with her statue of Christ the King, which was the first and largest of the statues she made for her major work—the Anglican Cathedral reredos.
Gardner continued to work at her art while raising her three children. She has exhibited her paintings—she works in watercolours, oil and acrylics—in local galleries and overseas in Boston and Rhode Island.
Her sculptures and carvings are in private homes and in public spheres, most notably at Mount St Agnes Academy and at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital. She has produced mosaics for gardens, swimming pools, even a Front Street sidewalk.
Gardner began working in stained glass in earnest after she acquired a small kiln that she returned to working order and began to experiment with. She later took a winter course in stained glass at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Her first major stained-glass commission came in 1968 when she made the Angel Window for the Cathedral. More commissions followed for windows at St. Peter’s West, St. George’s (1972), St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (1978, 1995), King Edward VII Memorial Hospital’s chapel (1978), St. Mary’s Church, Warwick (1980), St. Mark’s Church, Smith’s Parish (1988), St. John’s Church, Pembroke (1995) and St. Paul’s Church, Paget, (2000, 2004).
She did a series of windows for St. Anne’s Church, Southampton beginning in 1981 and continuing through to 2005. The Black Jesus which she created in 2000 for a window depicting the Ascension drew much attention, all of it favourable.
Her first major overseas work was the Rose Window that she made for the Congregational Church in Briarcliff Manor, New York in 1992. Her design won out over several East Coast studios. A second commission came the same year when she made a window for the Emanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Pleasantville, New York in memory of two brothers killed in a car crash.
Some of the windows and panels that she has made for homes and office—and for family members—have had a nautical theme. The Gardners are a sailing family, and she has crewed on boats competing in the biennial Marion to Bermuda races.
Her windows have been featured on three commemorative stamps, and in 1995 she was the recipient of a Bermuda Arts Council Lifetime Achievement Award.
Gardner, who was widowed in 2004, continues to paint and to create stained glass art well into her 80s. Gardner, who has five grandchildren, also enjoys calligraphy and bookbinding.
Her most recent work is ‘Processional’, six stained glass windows that she created for the Anglican Cathedral in memory of her husband, a former Cathedral architect. The windows were dedicated in January 2012.
In 2010, her stained-glass art was the subject of an exhibition, ‘Vivienne J. Gardner: A Tribute’, at the Bermuda National Gallery.
Visiting American curator Franklin Hill Perrell, who gave a lecture for the opening of the show, described Gardner as a “living national treasure.”
In 2008, she wrote about her work in a richly illustrated book The Stained Glass Art of Vivienne Gardner.
In it she writes: “I am never happier than when I am working hard in my studio with friendly people around and preferably with an animal or two.”
