Gregory Hardy

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…

Kent Archer (Curator)Kenderdine Art Gallery, 2009

Rumours about the death of painting have been greatly exaggerated. And never has its premature burial been more evident than in the work of Saskatchewan artist Greg Hardy. His fall show in Toronto was an example of how aesthetic obituaries are too hasty, even for the most perennial Canadian motif – the landscape.

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…