ALLEN GARDINER
COMPLEAT ARTIST & FREE SPIRIT
Allen Gardiner, Compleat Artist & Free Spirit, comes from a long line of independently minded ancestors. (One needs to know this in order to understand why Allen embodies a true love of human liberty in everything he creates as well as in every aspect of his daily life.) From his father he learned the importance of living his life with the utmost of integrity, and he inherited from his mother, a Scottish immigrant, a passion to speak out against all injustice.
Allen grew up at Denison, Kansas, where abolitionist forebears settled in 1856, and at an early age showed an interest in writing. When he was in the sixth grade his music teacher fashioned an operetta based on a story Allen wrote, and he had his first poem published in a newspaper at age 13. He later had a poem published in The Hemlock, the literary magazine of Washburn University of Topeka, which he attended while working for the Topeka Public Library part-time. He dropped out of school to taste real life, but later, while employed as federal programs librarian for the Kansas State Library from July 1971 until December 1985, he resumed his education at Ottawa University, a private liberal arts college. He received a Bachelor or Arts degree from Ottawa in English/Creative Writing, and was named to Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges.
In 1986, seeking adventure, Allen moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and established himself as a freelance writer, but over the years he has evolved into, as he puts it with iconoclastic whimsy, "a compleat artist & free spirit." There are few who would argue that this is who he is; fewer still who would dare to challenge him on this—not that he would care, for he is well aware that wherever there is chALLENge, he is in the middle of it. Today, he is a writer, photographer, composer and genealogist, but he refuses to be limited in his description of himself by his involvement in these media. He has been writing a newspaper column, Bay View, for ten years.
Allen says: "I am always receptive to the creative impulse that resides within, and whenever I feel the Divine energies desiring to flow through me, I submit. Entire short stories, ideas for novels and pieces of music have all come to me in dreams—although it is not I, but God, expressing through me, who has done the work.
"In the waking state, I seek that which is most beautiful in the world—and attempt to capture it on film, paper or on the piano. I especially love taking photographs of nature. Hallmarks of my work are pervading themes of timelessness and isolationism, as well as the intriguing fact that my photography usually includes roads or paths that lead who-knows-where. I remain a vessel, and, I hope, also a fountain . . ."