"Gregory Hardy - paintings 1984 - 1989"
Karen Wilkin
Mendel Art Gallery, 2001
click here for images from this exhibition
II. By 1984 Hardy had been assembling his vocabulary over a decade, polishing his craft, discovering what he wanted to paint about and something of how to do it, exploring a variety of directions and alternatives. At the end of that year; with more than ten years of serious painting behind him and the fresh stimulation of his European trip, Hardy began painting with new assurance. The pictures from this period on, large scale oils painted either directly from nature or from studies done from nature, are the works that established hardy's reputation. They are characterized by a powerful sense of place and time, translated into loaded surfaces, full throttle color and an urgent touch that seems like a graph of passionate feelings. For all of Hardy's hard-learned facility, they are often edgy pictures, slightly uncomfortable or deliberately awkward in ways that make the viewer pay that much more attention to just what the painter has done instead of simply recognizing the image. Despite his apparent fidelity to specific places, longer acquaintance with Hardy's pictures reveals his willingness to compress and tilt space, elide the middle distance, exaggerate things in the foreground. The planar geometry of the abstract landscapes he experimented with in the mid-70s persists in a subtle sense of underlying order that compensates for the vagaries of undisciplined nature. Ultimately, it's color that holds Hardy's pictures together and establishes the illusion that his world is a three-dimensional, inhabitable place. Color determines, too, mood and temperature, suggests weather and season, without resorting to the specifics of local color the tonal modulations of aerial perspective or conventional modelling from dark to light.The best pictures are often the most intense. Hardy's exaggerated color evokes the drama of extremes of weather and light: the still heat of a late summer day or the cold dimness of a winter morning, a blazing sunset over a limitless prairie or a shadowy forest interior; a cloud-dappled sky arching over a brilliant lake or the same lake whipped into whitecaps (and squeezing the sky out of the painting). Hardy is capable of other kinds of pictures, as well, more tranquil, more lyrical and, frequently, more conventional. Sometimes, the most heated pictures begin as relatively calm images that Hardy works and reworks particularly in the last few years, heightening and adjusting color; building a surface until, as he says, "it comes alive again"
"Still, today" Hardy says, "it's a kind of battle between wanting a sense of light and place and local color; and wanting to have all kinds of color. It seems the more color the paintings have, the more interested in them I am."
The simultaneous desire for a sense of place and for color sometimes leads Hardy to dare subject matter that would have satisfied the 19th-century longing for the sublime: lush sunsets, moonlit nights, picturesque clouds. It's only fair to point out that he has also been engaged by - and produced first-rate pictures about - such unpromising subjects as hillsides with bare tree trunks seen close up and weedy patches of willows beside shallow sloughs. Hardy's flamboyant subjects are risky choices and he knows it. At times he seems to be testing the limits of just how outrageous a motif he can use without succumbing to sentimentality. And despite their associations with 19th-century Romanticism, even Hardy's most extravagant pictures are firmly planted in the 20th century by virtue of his assertive touch. The mark of his brush is not simply a technical necessity either to be disguised or made to stand for an assortment of information about nature, but an end in itself, a declaration of the artist's presence as artificer and maker of choices. Perhaps even more important, the generous mark serves to establish a unit of scale on the surface of the canvas independent of the illusory scale of what is depicted, heightening the tension between the fact of paint and the fiction of representation.
This tension between the actual and the invented (in the broadest sense of both words) keeps Hardy's best pictures alive and surprising. In Side Hill with Poplars, 1987, for example, the chill of a winter hillside is suggested primarily by color; but it is color that proves to be wholly nonliteral: the whites aren't whites, the greys aren't greys but instead are tinged with other chromatic hues that break through and, paradoxically, make the picture's range of non-colors function as chroma. (Snow never looked like this!) The bare tree trunks that slice down from the top of the horizonless picture read as dark silhouettes but are, in fact, improbable verdigris greens and dull crimsons that, equally improbably, cool the temperature of the painting still further. Even the logic of construction is warped. The frieze of trunks is not superimposed on a continuous "ground" that stands for snow, but instead is engulfed by the brushy surroundings.
Hardy takes similar liberties with the "twin" of Side Hill with Poplars, entitled Old Forest, 1986, a green woodland interior where the fierce energy of growth finds its visual equivalent in a tree form excavated from its surroundings by the sheer density of paint piled on paint. He treads the borderline between the particular and the painted. A row of insistent, parallel vertical strokes reasserts the painter's hand and also becomes shorthand for a row of trees, while broken, vibrating color suggests dappled light in equally nonliteral ways. The sea of paint almost subsumes the image and the sense of layering, of workedness, of time spent building the picture's crusty surface, becomes a metaphor for the age of the forest itself. At the same time, in spite of its physical density, the picture seems on the verge of dissolution. Odd colors tug at our peripheral vision from the corners; strange blues flicker throughout. The image seems about to fragment into patches of paint; only the force of Hardy's will seems to keep it together.
Old Forest is typical of the best of Hardy's recent work in that the sheer density of paint on its surface bears witness if not precisely to labor; then to effort expended. It's something the artist is acutely aware of. He says he is frequently unsatisfied, these days, by pictures that once would have appeared quite complete to him after an initial campaign out-of-doors; now he feels he has to keep working on them. Watching a picture of Hardy's elolve in 1989, you keep seeing where he might have stopped had he been painting that picture in, say, 1985, or the stage he might have brought it to in 1986. This is not to belittle Hardy's earlier work. It's simply that his earlier plein air landscapes often depended upon the immediacy and energy of "one shot" execution, an approach that Hardy came to feel that he had exhausted or that left him little room for growth.
Hardy realized that the way forward from already successful pictures was, for him, to keep working through them, even at risk of losing the look of spontaneity that characterized paintings done rapidly from the landscape. "I came to think that I was stopping too soon," Hardy says. It had something to do with the example of the old master painters that he admired and something that can only be described as the character of painting in the 1980s.Hardy matured as a painter surrounded by abstract artists who strove to work out of pure intuition without imposing too much conscious calculation on their pictures. The risk was that the result might be mere manipulation of paint, but the hope was that the entire freight of the artist's uniqueness as a human being would somehow charge his materials and make the picture expressive. Keeping the picture or the sculpture fresh and unlabored was of paramount importance. Of course, some artists have been able to preserve the appearance of freshness while, in fact, reworking and altering their pictures or sculptures many times, but for many, the literal retention of the initial impulse was crucial. Some very good, very powerful art has been made as a result of these notions and Hardy attempted - and succeeded - making landscapes according to similar precepts. But in the past few years he found himself seeking, along with many other contemporary abstract and figurative artists, a greater degree of physicality, a more material sense of process in his work. Hardy's desire for more worked-looking pictures was not simply personal preference, but part of a recent widespread reaction to the character of painting of the 60s and 70s. He discovered that the paintings that he had returned to and reworked in the studio - pictures such as Old Forest, for example, which was begun out-of-doors at Emma Lake - had a visual, physical and emotional density that interested him.
Hardy's present working methods - which are subject to great variation, I should point out - are a combination of plein air start, either full size or as oil sketch or drawing, and continuation in the studio. Often the initial motif is changed drastically as the painting evolves and begins to assert its own demands. Hardy speaks of needing "to get the energy back in" as his studio paintings develop. "I get something from working from the landscape that I can lose in the studio and now it seems that I have to keep working on a picture until it comes back."
Hardy is intelligent enough to remain alert to suggestions that arise in the course of working. Over the years, he has stopped work on a small number of canvases when they seemed not so much resolved or complete as puzzling, keeping them in the studio to study periodically in order to find out if, in fact, they could lead to something new. In other instances, he has risked overworking a picture, even risked destroying it, in order to discover how far he could go in a given direction. The pictures that have been stopped at critical stages or; conversely, have been aggressively worked past Hardy's more usual point of completion often seem like "orphans" without a context in the body of Hardy's work. Frequently, though, they are prophetic works that lead the painter to explore new possibilities of color or structure or surface. The eccentric pictures become the ancestors of subsequent works that in turn provide the "orphans" with a context, after the fact.
In the summer of 1989, Hardy spent two weeks at Triangle Artists Workshop, an international event held at a large farm in upstate New York. The landscape, a broad valley enclosed by wooded hills, full of immense trees, cornfields, pastures, a large pond, was completely new to him. Hardy found the place difficult to cope with, at first. The heavy rains of the past spring had made the normally lush landscape remarkably exuberant. "It's like being in the jungle," Hardy complained. "All that green and those enormous leaves. And everything is soft - the light is so moist and hazy And every time I start a picture out-of-doors, I'm interrupted, something happens".
The first pictures he produced in this unfamiliar setting were relatively conventional, accomplished landscapes that nonetheless displayed a noticeable sensitivity to the look of the place. There was nothing wrong with them - some were even very beautiful - but they seemed predictable. Within a week, however; Hardy had begun several paintings in the barn that served as a communal studio, basing them on some of the most characteristic spots of the surrounding area - an unmistakable clump of trees on the far side of the pond, for example Tree at Mashomack. The initial drawing on these canvases was extraordinarily robust, virtually squeezed out of the tube, in surprisingly "unlandscapey" colors. "I had to force the energy into these," Hardy explained. By the end of his stay, Hardy had transformed these surprising beginnings into vigorous, elemental images that both suggested the special qualities of particular places and existed independently as highly charged painting. He also attacked several of the earlier pictures aggressively, simplifying their masses and intensifying their color. The finished canvases, both those begun later in his stay and the reworked earlier ones, severely criticized his initial efforts and, ironically, were far more evocative of Dutchess County than the more naturalistic versions of similar subjects. It's entirely possible, of course, that Hardy will continue to work on his Dutchess County paintings in his Saskatchewan studio and will further revise them. The broadness and directness of these paintings point to new possibilities for Hardy's landscapes; at the same time, they are like more substantial versions of a provocative, loosely painted woodland picture, totally unlike anything else Hardy has painted, up to now, but with a special authority that made him keep it, unexhibited, in the studio for several years. That woodland picture may now have descendants and a context.
