Vivian Gaines Tanner came to painting
relatively late in her life. In 
1976, after completing her first volume of poetry, she was inspired by a dream to illustrate the poems. Thc next morning, she says, she sat down at her kitchen table and began painting landscapes based on her dream. Tanner paints in the folk tradition of Grandma Moses and other self taught artists who draw upon their own innate ability rather than formal training to create paintings. In Tanner's case, she paints entirely from images in her head instead of from pictures or models or real life. It is a talent that she describes as a "God-given gift." and one that continues to give great pleasure both to the artist and to her admirers. Born in Newport R.I., Tanner was raised in Newburgh and continues to make Dutchess County her home. She lives with her husband, actor John Paxton, in the town of Hyde Park. The idea of exhibiting her work came to her after she was given a show in a local branch of the Bank of New York. Soon she had exhibits at other local venues, including the Barrett House in Poughkeepsie. As word of mouth spread and her audience grew, she and her husband decided to open the first African-American gallery in Dutchess County. Together they manage the Paxton-Tanner Gallery, established five yearn ago in the first floor of their Victorian house. Every available wall space is filled with canvases - lushly painted landscapes in the Impressionist style hang next to brightly colored flower studies of every conceivable shape and size. Tanner works in many different media - including some masterful pencil portraits of noted musician and conductor Arthur Fiedler of the Boston Pops and actor Lou Gossett Jr. - capturing the beauty of nature in acrylics, in watercolors, and somethimes in oils. Bucolic, pastoral scenes make up the majority of her works, punctuated here and there by images from her imagination. These cavases are simply filled with hundreds of short brush strokes, many of them in different shades of green, depicting thick groupings of trees that tower above meandering streams and lush aquatic-loving plants that hug the bottom of the canvas. The stream's dark waters are dappled with points of light from thin rays of sunlight that filter through a tall canopy of trees. It is a landscpae that can be seen over and over again in Tanner's work, and that is both familier (composed of trees, bushes, and water), and foreign, having been transformed by Tanner's vivid imagination into a lush, jungle-like space. |
| Vivian Gaincs Tanner-Paxton
46 Bennett Road Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 12601 Resident of Dutchess County, New York for over forty years. Business
Honors and Awards
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