Nicholas Metivier Gallery presents Landscape and Memory, a collection of new paintings by Greg Hardy, one of Canada’s distinguished landscape painters, with a longstanding career beginning in the 1970s. Though an experienced traveller, Hardy paints his home province of Saskatchewan, capturing the rich and diverse northern landscapes and the vast prairies surrounding his studio on the outskirts of Saskatoon. His vibrant and monumental landscapes combine ephemeral emotion with representations of the physical land, creating something that is at once subjective, yet universal.
A signature of Hardy’s landscapes is his unique way of expressing clouds. Among the flatlands and prairies of Saskatchewan that are evoked in the paintings, the sky dominates. Hardy captures the sky’s majesty with voluminous clouds. During the artist’s talk at the opening reception, Hardy compared the sky to a stage set, where the clouds are the actors themselves, moving around, with, or against each other. The clouds don’t statically stand above you, but they confront and approach you.
Greg Hardy, Mid Day Laughter, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 68 ½ inches. ©Greg Hardy, courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery.
Hardy’s skillful and intuitive use of paint really shines through in these clouds. Half-mixed pigments, expressive brushstrokes, and the quick-drying qualities of acrylic paint—in which different layers dry at different rates creating a crackling effect that exposes layers of colour below—evoke a landscape that is alive; an entity, continually in motion. With no predetermined palette, and the ability to remove or add paint to the canvas as desired, Hardy displays the same intuitive and free-spirited characteristics as the nature he depicts. Even in landscapes with cloudless skies, there is still movement and life, achieved through his specific use of colour.
Greg Hardy, Shoreline Glowing, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 84 inches. ©Greg Hardy, courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery.
Landscape and Memory takes its title from Simon Schama’s groundbreaking book about how human encounters with nature are manifested in our cultures. Hardy takes this idea to a more personal level, translating his own encounters with nature into a tangible representation of his memory and feeling of those experiences. His process involves spending time immersed in nature and creating studies or quick sketches of his surroundings, taking notes about the weather, light and, above all, his emotional response. He then takes these sketches and notes to the studio where he paints a landscape filtered through his own recollection of it. Indeed, his paintings are highly gestural and one can feel a sense of immediacy, as if recalling a memory over and over again in order to not forget it.
Though Hardy is exclusively a landscape painter, it is difficult not to see some influence of abstract art in his work. His focus on expressing emotion through gestural brushstrokes and colour on large-scale canvasses are hallmarks of abstraction. One catches a glimpse of the Colour Field Movement when taking a closer look at “Down the Gravel Road”, or Abstract Expressionism in the clouds of “Out in the Kayak, Great Time of Day”.
Greg Hardy, Out in the Kayak, Great Time of Day, 2024, acrylic on linen, 36 x 48 inches. ©Greg Hardy, courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery.
During his formative years as an artist in the 70s, Hardy participated in the renowned Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop, where various guest artists were invited to mentor dozens of other artists. This longstanding tradition at Emma Lake influenced the popularity of abstract art throughout the province, and undoubtedly continues to influence Hardy’s work today. His landscapes can be seen not only as a culmination of his relationship to nature, but also of his relationship to art and other artists. At the conclusion of the artist’s talk, John Geoghegan commented that the paintings are as much about Hardy as they are about the land. Standing amid his landscapes in the gallery, filled with pure emotion, colour and light, one can’t help but wholeheartedly agree.
Greg Hardy, Down the Gravel Road, 2024, acrylic on linen, 30 x 48 inches. ©Greg Hardy, courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery.
Rebekah Barona
*Exhibition information: Greg Hardy, Landscape and Memory, February 8 – March 8, 2025, Nicholas Metivier Gallery, 190 Richmond Street East, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tue – Sat, 10am – 5pm.