Greg Hardy’s paintings of Saskatchewan plains give full expression to the exuberance of clouds and their remarkable formations across the blank canvas of sky. Hardy supplies an astonishing range of colours and brushstrokes – fleshy pink and lemon yellow clouds smeared with red and streaked with blue, orange and purple. Shades of pink and aqua evoke a Southwestern landscape and scrubby grass and trees could be the Serengeti plains in Africa, yet the quality of light in these paintings expresses the temperament of weather on the Prairies. The textured, built-up surface of paint creates a level of abstraction that is more like a memory or sensation of place rather than its exact representation and often the landscape is distorted, as though reflected in a rippled surface of water or seen through the shimmer of afternoon heat rising from the ground. Here is the legacy of the Group of Seven – transforming the familiar landscape into something unexpected and wonderful.
Greg Hardy lives in Saskatoon and has exhibited extensively across Canada and abroad since 1975. His work is held in the collections of the Mendel Art Gallery, the Edmonton Art Gallery and the Canadian Embassy, External Affairs (San Jose, Beijing, Warsaw, Sydney, London, Los Angeles). Corporate collection include Scotiabank, Xerox, Four Seasons, Shell Oil and DuPont.
