Byron Gardner

Byron Gardner

Gardner, Byron

Portland 1930

Oregon

Oregon City 1992

painter

printmaker

draftsman

Northwest artist

Oregon artist

An art professor at Portland State University from 1967 to 1992, Byron Gardner was known for his landscapes of the American Southwest. He used a strong, bright palette to produce work that was poetic and lyrical. He was inspired by the western landscape to seek new relationships of form, color, and shape, first in Oregon's high desert country and then in Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico. His early work was figurative; later Gardner was one of Oregon's foremost abstract expressionist painters. In his middle years, his interest and proficiency in falconry was evidenced by the theme of flight expressed in his paintings.

Byron Gardner was one of the founding artists of the Portland Art Museum's Rental Sales Gallery in 1959. He maintained an affiliation with the gallery throughout his life.

Artist biography reproduced with permission from the authors, Oregon Painters: the First Hundred Years (1859-1959), Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit.

Male