Fran Hardy's colorful, sensual images, seemingly captured at their most fertile moments, belie her arduous, time-consuming techniques.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published February 22, 2004
Fran Hardy, Flash, oil over egg tempera with gold leaf on panel.
Fran Hardy, Oranges and Bougainvillea, oil over egg tempera on panel.
LARGO - Both in size and content, the exhibition of 13 paintings by Fran Hardy at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art is like an amuse bouche, the small treat a chef sometimes serves between courses. Or an intermezzo that fluffs the heaving emotions in an opera.
Hardy's work is beautiful and beguiling, and not much more. But taken on its own masterful technical terms, it really doesn't need to be.
She uses the time-consuming method, rarely favored by artists in this quick-dry acrylic age, of painting a base on a birch panel with egg tempera, making elaborate, monochromatic cross-hatches of the images. She adds color a little at a time, building up dozens of layers of oil glazes that produce the rich luminosity you see in Renaissance paintings. (That's no coincidence; Hardy, who lives in Punta Gorda, was inspired to explore the process after seeing such a work by Italian Old Master Giovanni Bellini.) That a painting can take six months to finish is no surprise.
The technique well serves Hardy's botanical subject matter, which falls somewhere between landscapes and still lifes. In tone, too, paintings are hard to peg, with references to photo-realism, magic realism and even surrealism.
Hardy revels in intense, sometimes lurid, colors for the fruits, flowers and other, mostly tropical, plant life that she paints more as remembered scenes than directly observed images. Everything is in its ripest moment of fecundity, bursting with life. We know it's part of a cycle of inevitable death and decay, but in the oranges hovering above bougainvillea or the papayas that look achingly ready for plucking are none of the mordant symbolism and allusion you find in many 16th-century and 17th-century still lifes.
Even the lightnindg that rips through clouds in Flash, which could have been loaded with portent, is simply one more natural element, a convenient one responsible for the lavender and magenta in the clouds and the wind that ruffles a coconut palm in the painting's foreground. Hardy employs a mildly abstract sensibility to some of these works. In Flash, for example, the painting is broken up into panels. Those painted with clouds, on the left side, blend into each other. Those on the right, mostly filled with the palm, are handled as separate details of the tree, like snapshots pasted into a collage.
Morning Mist Rising might be more aptly named Orchids and Bromeliads Levitating since they seem to float upward in a subtly colored, atmospheric background toward a bunch of bananas like strangers drifting toward each other in a singles bar. And, like many of those encounters, this one seems random and artificial.
But artifice has never been an enemy of painting which, for most of its history, has been in the business of illusion. Just to reinforce the point, Hardy has begun adding, in her most recent work, bits of gold leaf, gilding an already opulent lily, so to speak. Sometimes it seems gratuitous, sometimes really interesting, as in Noon Heat and Fragrant Bloom.
Hardy interrupts the gorgeous flow of oranges and orange blossoms across the horizontal expanse of Noon Heat and Fragrant Bloom with a broad slash of gold leaf, cutting through the fertile terrain like the yellow brick road. I see in it a kinship with James Rosenquist's oversized objects, sliced into discreet entities and dramatically colored. The difference is that an artist like Rosenquist uses them to create a social commentary and to set up dialogue between the juxtaposed images and the viewer. In Hardy's world, beauty is its own - and only - excuse for being.
* "Fran Hardy: In a Brilliant Light" is at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, 12211 Walsingham Road, Largo, through Feb. 29. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Adults, $5; seniors, $4; students, $3 and children 12 and younger free. Free on Thursday. (727) 518-6833.
* A concurrent show of more paintings by Hardy is at Kingdon Alan Gallery, 70 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, through Wednesday. Call (727) 825-0111 for gallery hours.
