Biography

Lionel Garner (legal name, Lionel Garnier) was born June 3, 1931 in Beaumont-Village, Touraine, France, where he lived with his father, a blacksmith, his mother, a homemaker, and five brothers and sisters. Garner attended school in his village until age 8, when WWII was declared. That marked the end of his education and, as Garner put it, “the darkest period of my teenage years.” He was unable to attend school or pursue higher education during the war because the educational infrastructure in the unoccupied “free zone,” where his village was located, had fallen apart. 

Garner left home at age 16 to move to Paris to pursue his passion for drawing. He moved in with his mother’s family, whom he did not know prior to making the move. He later lived on his own on Rue St-Julien Le Pauvre, across from Square Viviani, facing the Notre-Dame Cathedral, and used to set up his easel to practice painting on the banks of the Seine. He took charcoal drawing lessons from two fine arts teachers in a municipal hall at Lamarck-Caulincourt, and did charcoal sketches for money in his spare time in Montmartre, Place du Tertre.  

Garner served in the military for 18-months at the Saumur Cavalry School, where he met a Saumur resident named Denise who would later become his wife. Together they had one daughter, Laurence. 

Garner’s painting career began to flourish when he followed the advice of a friend, a French artist named Farina, and exhibited at the Grand Palais' Salon des Indépendants in the early 1980s. Farina suggested to Garner that he take the "i" out of his name, because there were several other artists exhibiting under the name “Garnier.” It was during this first exhibition that he began using the pseudonym “Garner.”  

In addition to several subsequent exhibitions at the Salon des Indépendants, Garner’s works have been exhibited at the Salon des Arts et Métiers in Hotel de Ville in Paris, the Salon des Artistes Français, the Salon d'Automne, and the Francilienne des Arts in Chateau de Lormoy, where he was presented with the Senate Award.  His work has also been shown in galleries across the world, including in Paris, Prague, Oberhausen, Geneva and New York. 

The subject matter of Garner’s works is primarily of the Loire Valley and its chateaus, because, as he stated, it “reminded me of my youth.” At times, he would create his art on location, first making a sketch and then finishing it in his studio. Later in his life, he would travel across France with his wife to take pictures of the places he would then reproduce in his paintings.  He was particularly interested in landscapes created by mirror images reflecting from water. To create realism of the water reflections, he used what is called "glaze technique." Because of the multiple layers of paint used to perfect this technique, and because of the photo-realistic detail in his paintings, each work took several months to complete. The depth in his paintings is in part the result of pigment blends and many successive layers. During the period when he was actively painting, pigments hadn't undergone any ecological modification, and Garner claims that his technique cannot be reproduced with modern pigments.  He stated, “with modified pigments, it's impossible to achieve the blends on which the ‘glaze technique’ depends.” 

The rise in popularity of contemporary art over the last several decades made Garner feel that fine art was completely marginalized. He stated that, within a decade of his initial exhibitions, “modern art became ubiquitous, sometimes with excess. You could see the pieces of Italian artist Piero Manzoni at the Modern Art Museum in Paris. That's when the CDAGP (Committee for the Defense of Artists of Grand Palais) was created. During a general meeting of this committee, the President of the Fine Arts School, Mr. Baboulet at that time, shouted while raising his arms to the sky, ‘We no longer teach at the Fine Arts School, it's all about free expression now!’ At the same time, Jean Clair's academic writings were saying that modern art is a return to the primitive brain and that we are happily and savagely burying our own culture.”

When Garner’s wife passed away, he lost his passion to continue painting. He stated, “Alone, during the first year, at age 83, I painted a series of tiny, sophisticated canvases - to forget, get lost, and think of nothing else.  I've stopped painting since then.” 

Regarding the future of art, Garner stated, “The West went through an unprecedented century. Personally, though age may account for part of this, I can't always understand people who are drawn into this maze under the pretext of free expression. With the development of new technologies, our culture has undergone great degradation. But I want to remain optimistic because I see a timid return to figurative art, despite all the difficulties created by new pigments under the pretext of ecology.” 

Garner currently lives in a small village outside of Paris, in the same home he once shared with his wife, Denise, and daughter, Laurence.

This biography is based on an interview of Lionel Garner conducted by David Kokakis, an avid U.S. collector of Garner’s work, in Garner’s home in a suburb outside of Paris on February 21, 2017. The original interview was directed in French and then translated and edited by Marine Parent, David Kokakis and Laurence Garnier. The interview can be read on this site.