About the Arts
DeWitt Hardy retrospective at the York Public Library
By Rose Safran
YORK VILLAGE - Many years ago, when I visited DeWitt Hardy's home in South Berwick, I chatted with Pat Hardy, who is also an artist."You can't believe the places where he paints," she said at that time of DeWitt Hardy, a well-established artist who is nationally known for his excellent watercolors that are in the collections of American museums including the Smithsonian, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art as well as in museums abroad such as Ireland's Dublin Museum of Modern Art and the British Museum.
Who but DeWitt Hardy would drive about the countryside, his materials packed in his truck/wagon, and, sighting a series of box cars, paint them as he does in a realist work such as "Soo Line," currently on view at the York Public Library. And then there is "Adam's Work" - in which a cart filled with miscellaneous artifacts tells a story of labor, perhaps items needing to be recycled and/or carted away - or maybe just left there, waiting for their owner, interrupting nature's beauty. Such watercolors are, in their special way, environmental statements, as well as comments on the world about us. Railroad tracks, mansard-roofed houses from another period, current beach scenes such as "Buddy" at leisure seated at the deck of a beach house, reading the Sunday Times figure in the broad scope of this talented artist's oeuvre.
Best known for his figurative art on which he has focused over the years, Hardy is certainly adept at capturing interior moments and activities, too.
Enter the York Public Library.
To the right of the vestibule is a large painting of an interior household scene entitled, "Chamber of Genius." In this painting, the artist is at work duplicating the setting, including himself. He holds a mirror to his face, two children are seen to the left of him, along with their scattered paraphernalia, while assorted casually-arranged home furnishings and art tools add to the scene; all this seeming disorder is included in the meticulously drawn painting, representing quite an undertaking. Hardy is undaunted by the ambitious project of reproducing a painting within a painting while painting himself.
The most available model to any artist remains one's self. Hardy frequently employs his own immediacy in such works as "Dream Life," in which he tucks a figure of himself under a blanket at the same time he imposes an image of what appears to be the Ogunquit River and dunes - hence, the interior reverie mixed with the anticipated work - a literal translation, perhaps, of the artist's somnolent state. Another self-portrait places him inside a rail car, in the distance through the window lies a house.
Friends and acquaintances also appear in his works of art. There is the impressive "Portrait of Donna," in which the woman's full length figure is reflected in a mirror, giving us dual images along with various angles of the human body. Too, we are taken to warm climates in such works as "Haole Girl in Paradise," which combines the lush tropical world with the sensual figure. And the excitement of the rockbound splashing Atlantic doesn't escape Hardy's skilled brush in a work such as "Along the Marginal Way."
In the current exhibit, another Hardy dimension, one with which we tend to be less familiar, emerges: florals. But as with his interest in odd-angled perspectives whether of countryside or figures, it is not simply a static portrait flower we look at, the classic rigidly drawn still-life. No, it might be an elongated stem, a close-up of a petal, or a curiously turned flower, a modernist form. Roses of various hues - red, pink, white - grace the York Public Library walls as in "Predatory Rose"... "Rose in Entryway" ..."Roses and Babies' Breath" ... "Close Rose."
DeWitt Hardy also finds time to teach studio art, notably at Kennebunk's Heartwood College of Art, at Eliot's Sanctuary Arts and at the Coolidge Center for the Arts in the Little Harbor section of Portsmouth, N.H., where his "Watercolor Survey" course will begin Sept. 25. (Call 603-436-6607 for information.)
He has also created designs for theatrical productions. A graduate of Syracuse University, from 1964-1977 Hardy was curator and associate director of the private oceanfront Ogunquit museum informally known locally as "The Strater Museum" before it was incorporated as the present-day non-profit Ogunquit Museum of American Art. He is a member of the Ogunquit Art Association and his watercolors have been exhibited in many New England group shows in galleries and museums. For further information, call 363-2818.
