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" One hundred and fifty years ago, the artists and writers of the Romantic era regarded the natural world with a kind of brooding reverence. &amp;quot;That idea of nature doesn&amp;#039;t exist anymore,&amp;quot; says Canadian painter Tim Gardner. &amp;quot;Today the landscape is managed all over the planet. Anything sublime is technological.&amp;quot; But even if every square inch of Earth can now be surveyed on a computer, the tension between man and the environment remains firmly in place. At first glance, Gardner&amp;#039;s scenes of what might be described as people at the brink of the wilderness\u2014a lone tourist contemplating a picturesque landscape is a common theme\u2014appear to fit neatly alongside the banalist tableaux of such photographers as Andreas Gursky and Nan Goldin. But his choice of medium, watercolor on paper, and his soft, painterly execution make the work more intriguing and intimate than a photograph&amp;#039;s neutral testimony.  Gardner was raised in the university town of Waterloo, Ontario, and spent summers with his family in the glorious Canadian Rockies, where his geographer father did fieldwork. He grew up awed by the wild, but he was keenly aware of how domesticated it had become. An important influence was the Group of Seven, a circle of Canadian artists who, in the 1920s, helped publicize the beauty of the western mountain landscape, in part to promote tourism there.  &amp;quot;I love the idea of trying to connect with nature but having something in the way, a window or a guardrail,&amp;quot; Gardner says. While his early source material included photographs taken by other people, primarily his brothers, he now shoots his own subjects, virtually all strangers. &amp;quot;Usually it&amp;#039;s someone kind of like me,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;wandering around nature and wondering how to be part of it.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s an enduring problem, one that has provided Gardner with fertile ground. Click here to see photos of Tim Gardner&amp;#039;s work. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/a2643/art-show-tim-gardner-a-65073/>