As a child Vaughn Whitney Garland walked into rooms and changed them.  He drew them out on paper and rearranged them the way he wanted.  He made them better for him.  He made them places he wanted to live.  Garland has learned that this same simple principle follows him through his work.  Either with gestured layers in the paintings, or with delicate marks in the drawings, he is rearranging things to make them clearer and cleaner.

Garland received two Bachelors of Arts degrees from Emory and Henry College in Emory, VA.  The first was in English Literature where he learned to break down the form of language to the essential meaning and to reconstruct the thought of the writer.  At the same time Garland studied painting and drawing where he took the same deconstructive methods and broke down the pictorial space to its essential forms.  Garland first started as a landscape painter working with market scenes from images collected from his trips to Europe. 
           

Garland continued the landscape paintings at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Graduate Painting and Printmaking School.  He started to form his own narrative meanings in the paintings.  When this happened, a natural digression from representation to abstraction happened.  Garland learned that by telling a story about what he was thinking, he could simply use a series of complex marks instead of relying on symbols to carry a meaning. Now Garland has taken these complex marks and is once again breaking the marks to make them even more direct. 
           

Garland received a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in May of 2003.  He has shown in several regional galleries including ones in Richmond, VA and New York, NY,  Garland is currently working on his PhD at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Media, Art, and Text program.

2011