"Gregory Hardy - paintings 1984 - 1989"
Karen Wilkin
Mendel Art Gallery, 2001
click here for images from this exhibitionI. I first saw a painting by Greg Hardy in 1973 at one of the University of Saskatchewan's Emma Lake workshops. It was a large, awkward, almost child-like landscape with a rigid figure, a stop sign and a perfectly wonderful dog. The drawing was schematic, the paint handling tentative, as though the painter weren't quite sure of what he was doing, but the picture had a remarkable intensity and conviction that made it, as it turns out, unforgettable. Especially the dog. Hardy, who had just turned twenty-three, and I talked about what he was doing, what he hoped to be doing, and tried to pin down just what those of us at the workshop liked about the dog, why it was so much better than the rest of the picture. I discovered that Hardy was more or less self-taught as a painter. His only formal training was in photography, but he'd gotten bored with what he perceived as the mechanical, indirect properties of the medium and had begun to draw and paint on his photographic prints. He had been painting daily for about a year I remember Hardy's saying something about what he painted being very specific, about places or things that he had seen that meant something to him. It showed, even through the tyro's paint handling and the clunky drawing.
Over the next few years, I tried to see Hardy's work whenever I was in Saskatoon, which was fairly regularly. He had taken a studio in the same building as the painter Robert Christie, and clearly Hardy's proximity to Christie was important. Not that their work was at all similar; at the time, Christie was making eccentric, abstract pictures that seemed a response to the challenge of Jack Bush's work of the 1970s, while Hardy was struggling with simplified images of the prairies. But the daily encounters with Christie's exacting (and more sophisticated) eye and the discussions of each other's work helped to sharpen Hardy's focus. Christie demands a great deal of himself. He is not easily satisfied by his own work, but always seems to aspire to something better, an attitude that impressed Hardy and allowed him to remain sceptical about my enthusiasm for pictures of the dog and stop sign type. It helped him to get on with the task of turning himself into a painter. As well, Christie has always been able to handle brilliant chromatic color and I suspect that his example encouraged Hardy to experiment with a similarly saturated palette or at least, gave him the confidence to follow his inclination towards bright color. Other Saskatchewan artists, such as Douglas Bentham, Dorothy Knowles and William Perehudoff, provided encouragement and helpful criticism, too, and Hardy responded by producing a series of astonishingly fresh small pictures that were equally notable for their economical treatment of landscape imagery and for their clear unmodulated color.
Hardy's paintings of 1974 to 1975 were so vigorous and so personal that it was disappointing to see him change direction about 1976. His exuberant landscapes, often painted from nature, became increasingly stylized; Hardy now describes them as "clunky Paul Klees." It was not that he thought that abstraction was somehow more "advanced" than working from nature, as many young artists of his generation did. Rather he explains the change as part of "a process of uninhibited experimentation."
Ironically, the shift to a greater degree of abstraction was triggered by Hardy's being forced to pay even more attention to the landscape, once he moved out of Saskatoon to Meacham. In the small prairie town, there was nothing but landscape on every side, and in the winter it was a monochromatic expanse a good deal of the time "The beginning of the abstract pictures" hardy says, "came out of a need to relieve the boredom of working in a dim studio in Meacham in the middle of winter. I wanted to invent color for it's own sake". Something similar occurred almost a decade later when hardy spent the fall and winter of 1985 in Toronto. Working in an urban studio in one of the scrubbier industrial districts of the city, in winter; he found his surroundings so drab that he began, for the first time, to paint still lifes that included large bunches of out-of-season flowers. "It's nothing unusual", Hardy says. "My instinct was always towards color."
More disturbing than Hardy's move toward abstraction was his virtual retreat from painting itself for almost a year in the mid-70s. He was preoccupied with an enormous project, collaboration on a 4000-square-foot clay mural for the exterior of a new Government of Saskatchewan building in downtown Saskatoon. Hardy had initially refused when the ceramist Randy Woolsey asked him to help prepare a competition proposal for the site, but he eventually was convinced to work on a general design.
He began working on preliminary sketches for the mural in the fall of 1976; in the spring of 1977 he moved to Cupar Saskatchewan, to work with Woolsey on the actual clay elements for the project, which was completed the following spring, 1978. The finished mural, which animates the east facade of the Sturdy Stone Building, is an all-over scattering of repeated but varied motifs, stylized organic shapes in low relief that suggest plant or landscape forms without looking specifically like anything pre-existing in nature. The palette of glazes is subdued for Hardy, an earthy range wholly unlike the near-Fauvist colors of his pre-mural paintings. The small group of watercolors hardy produced while working on the mural, not surprisingly, develops and expands the motifs he was exploring in clay. These economical little pictures are often divided horizontally, so that the ambiguous shapes of the mural take on more precise meanings by virtue of having been assigned to "earth" or "sky"; color in the watercolors, is once again intense and heightened, as though Hardy were reacting against the restrictions imposed by the site and materials of the ceramic project.
Many of Hardy's pictures of this type are uncannily like some of Georgia O'Keeffe's abstracted landscape watercolors of the 1920s, pictures he says he was not particularly interested in or even specially aware of. Asked which artists he did find provocative in the years when he was striving to find his own direction, Hardy's list includes painters chiefly known for dealing with recognizable landscape imagery - or rather landscape imagery filtered through a powerful individual vision - and one Abstract Expressionist. "I always admired David Milne for his energy," Hardy says. "Milton Avery and Adolph Gottlieb are there somewhere, although I can't lock them into a specific time. John Marin would fit in there somewhere as well, although in '78 I would have seen him only in reproduction. Goodridge Roberts was someone I admired quite deeply, as well as Tom Thomson"
The inclusion of Gottlieb in this company is interesting. Hardy says he was very impressed by an exhibition of Gottlieb's paintings of the 1940s, the Pictographs, that he saw in Toronto in 1978. Gottlieb's allusive hieroglyph-like images, along with the way they were distributed across the surface of the canvas in an unstable grid, fascinated Hardy. "I was thinking about hieroglyphics then and their meaning" he says. The Pictographs may have seemed related to what Hardy was seeking in his own painting at the time - a synthesis of reference to nature and simple geometric order - but I suspect that Gottlieb's paintings of the 1950s, the Imaginary Landscapes, may have provided an even stronger stimulus. These horizontally split, declaratively frontal pictures, their lower zones filled with robust calligraphy, upper zones punctuated by essential geometric shapes, offer a clear parallel to hardy's paintings of 1978 and 1979.
During these years, Hardy's work became even more abstract, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his implied landscapes became increasingly geometric. It was an unusual period for the young artist. In 1978, he had met a young law student, Wanda Wiegers, and on completing the clay mural, Hardy uprooted himself once again, to follow her to halifax, Nova Scotia. (They have lived together since then.) After a year dedicated to the ceramic project, he found himself trying to begin to paint seriously in an unfamiliar setting, while supporting himself by working on the docks of Dartmouth, across the river. "I made about twelve watercolors from the landscape while I was there," Hardy recalls. "The rest were made in the studio out of my head." Even after the couple returned to Meacham in the spring of 1979, Hardy continued to paint what he describes as "abstract landscapes. I wasn't dealing directly with the landscape, although they were still more specifically prairie landscapes - Avery influenced. But they didn't really go anywhere."
Hardy returned to Emma Lake in the summer of 1979. The guests that year were German-born, Boston-based abstract painter Friedel Dzubas, known for his brooding dramas of smoldering masses of color; and the British-born critic and art historian, John Elderfield, director of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
"Dzubas had a great effect on me," Hardy says. "I'd have to say he was a kindred spirit. He had been painting a long time and cared about it. He passed this on by osmosis. He seemed genuinely to like my work and I responded to his work." John Elderfield, however had a more direct and subtle influence on Hardy's development. "He said the problem I would have to face was that I had too vivid an imagination. He used Hans Hofmann as an example - his desire to experiment, often to the detriment of the picture. I was doing about three or four different things at the lake that year. It didn't bother me too much because I like and respect Hofmann's work so much. But I still think about it."
In part because of Elderfield's comments, Hardy began to work once again out-of-doors, painting directly from nature. "I deliberately wanted to restrain imagination. I wanted to pay attention to local color" In a sense, the results of this self-imposed program mark the beginning of Hardy's mature work, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in them Hardy committed himself to a direction that he still follows. Paradoxically, working directly from nature eventually freed Hardy the way working from more or less predetermined compositions freed abstract painters such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. As with his abstract painter predecessors, Hardy found that accepting a given structure (in his case, given by the motif he selected in nature) allowed him to concentrate on the expressive possibilities of nuances of color surface, interval, edge and so on. By using his direct observations and responses to nature as points of departure, Hardy was finally able to allow his imagination free rein, in terms of color touch or manipulation of space, without losing the potency of his initial confrontation with a specific place.
The earliest of Hardy's paintings from nature, however, remained largely faithful to what was seen, albeit painted with extreme freedom and vigor. Hardy's debt to the work of Dorothy Knowles was apparent, as though he had consciously apprenticed himself to the older artist. Since Knowles is arguably western Canada's most original and best landscape painter it's understandable. In addition, Knowles was an old friend; Hardy was thoroughly familiar with her work and admired it.
Knowles's pictures evoke particular places, particular phenomena of weather, time of day or season, with startling accuracy, not because of finicky detail, but because of the artist's unfailing sense of color and light. Her canvases and watercolors are always celebrations of the sensuous act of painting, but they also seem to have come into being without any mediation between seeing and result; touch and sense of materiality are evident, but at the same time, it appears as though Knowles's eye dictated what was set down without the intervention of concern for technique, manner or style.
Hardy acknowledges that he was after something similar in his own work. He had spoken of it back in 1973, at Emma Lake - a desire to encapsulate his perceptions and his feelings about specific places. "And I wanted to paint directly, to really pay attention to particulars without thinking about style and such." The superficial resemblance of his paintings of 1980 to some of Knowles's work doesn't upset him. "Maybe it was because I had seen so much of Dorothy's work," he says. "Or maybe that's what happens when you really pay attention to local color and particulars."
Knowles's example was significant to Hardy in other ways. Like him, she had begun as a landscape painter but during the early 1960s, she had experimented with abstraction - despite her preference for working from nature - before finding her own vision of the landscape and ignoring considerations of what might be regarded as up-to-date in painting. Hardy had already stopped painting abstractly by 1980, but it is possible that Knowles's experience provided confirmation that returning to landscape themes did not mean abdication of ambition for the quality and reach of one's art.
Even though Hardy's plein air landscapes of 1980 proved seminal in establishing his future direction, he describes the next few years as "a flat period." He was, largely, devoting his energies to mastering a subtle and, for him, new medium - oil paint. Hardy is young enough to have begun to paint with acrylic; he had never used oil before the spring of 1980. Oil paint's slow-drying properties, which had been the bane of the abstract and Pop painters of the 1960s and had precipitated their quick adoption of newly developed acrylics, were a plus for Hardy "Since I went outside to work directly, oil made that easier," he says. "Also, I didn't like the color of acrylic. It wasn't intense enough. And I didn't want to continue with watercolors."
Hardy worked fairly large scale at this time, usually on masonite. He liked the way the paint sat up on the surface, allowing him to emphasize the material substance of his pigment. When he had abandoned photography for painting, in the early 1970s, it was, in part, because he found the mechanical medium lacked physicality. Working out-of-doors in oil, on masonite, Hardy was starting to make objects that not only looked like places that were special to him - photography could have done that - but whose material properties were beginning to be equivalents for his feelings and experiences of place. Yet despite his voluptuous paint handling, Hardy remained remarkably attached to literal appearance in his pictures of the early 1980s, attached to local color especially, in his effort "to restrain imagination."
In 1982, an encounter with that year's Emma Lake workshop leader the New York painter Stanley Boxer proved - once again - decisive. Boxer a notably inventive colorist, criticized Hardy for being too dependent on actuality and on local color. "It was pretty general but it rekindled my interest in Fauvism, which I thought I'd left behind," Hardy recalls. Kenworth Moffett, then curator of contemporary art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, had said something similar at the 1980 workshop. "It wasn't addressed to me, but Moffett said there was lots of room left in Fauvism. I remembered that when Stanley said what he did."
Even more important, Boxer spoke to Hardy of an attitude toward picture making that has stayed with him. "He said that you have to be very aware of every square inch of the painting. It was general advice, but over the years it's become even truer"
At the workshop and soon after; Hardy's response to Boxer's comments was immediately visible. The smallish landscapes of this period once again have the intensified palette of those promising landscapes of the mid-70s - a red sky, a black-green tree, an orangey foreground - and a new intensity of paint application. They are fulfillments of the implications of the paintings on masonite of 1980 and 1981 and, with the advantage of hindsight, we can see them as prefigurations of many of Hardy's current concerns, in embryonic form.
