Posts by Greg

Landscape provides Gregory Hardy with an inexhaustible source of mystery. His paintings are not representations of actual landscape as much as they are surrogates for the artist’s experience of nature. In an amalgam of the observed and the imagined, Hardy invokes the memory of the original experience, and finds an emotional and spiritual equivalence. Acknowledged in this process is a recognition of the seemingly arbitrary character of memory, where some aspects of experience achieve a greater significance in the mind than others. Hardy’s paintings, rooted in the experience of the transformative processes of nature, serve as metaphor for the duality of an inner and outer world.

Kent Archer (Curator)Kenderdine Art Gallery, 2009

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.

Named for the small, stunted trees that grow in its permafrost, the subarctic “Land of the Little Sticks” is one of the simplest ecosystems on earth. Consisting mainly of short mosses, lichens, and mossy wetlands, the rolling tundra seems to reach to the horizon in every direction. Here, in the NWT, Greg Hardy interprets this unique landscape in his rich paintings: “Sometimes when I see the landscape it disintegrates into a million different pieces. When I work I’m trying to put all those pieces back together in a way that is slightly different than the way it was before…”