Painting from Life, some thoughts
Art critic, Jerry Saltz, on coming upon a Bonnard at MOMA: “An interior, a still life, a domestic scene, a landscape…..life. Away from ‘radicality', into life.”
I’d argue that painting from life is a radical undertaking, particularly in this time. And when I look around me and respond with paint on a 2-dimensional surface, my quest is to ascertain the essence of life.
I am interested in the interior, with and without figures, and all that that space implies. And I am excited by how light creates and reveals meaning. So, with the tools available to me (my eye and my paint), I make a record of the experience of looking. As the work unfolds, the idea or feeling becomes clearer and is refined and tested for its veracity. My goal is to give cohesion, with light, space, color, and form, to my visual and emotional experience.
Capturing the gesture of objects and figures is another part of my visual work. How they stand or lean or sit, as well as the sense and feeling of a real space, excites my imagination.
My painting is a record of my continuing discovery of meaning through looking—“into life”, radically.
Biography
Valerie Hardy has lived and worked as an artist in Virginia since 1981, in Richmond since 2008. Over her entire artistic career, Hardy has focused on the interplay of the objects, the spaces, the light, the people, that catch her eye. Her challenge is to reveal the relationships among and between them, in a way that says something visually interesting while representing these things as identifiably themselves. She paints exclusively from life, and finds the immediacy of responding to the circumstances she sees and feels to be a continuously thrilling challenge.
Hardy completed a one-month residency at the ACI program in Umbria, Italy, in 2022, as well as in Paris in 2018 for a 2 month residency at the Cite des Arts Internationale. She completed a one-month residency in March 2019 at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, one of the leading artists communities in the world with locations in Amherst, Virginia, and Auvillar, France. The VCCA hosts over 400 fellow-artists at Mt. San Angelo in central Virginia and 40 fellow-artists at the Moulin à Nef in France. The artists who come to VCCA are selected by a peer review jury on the basis of the important or innovative work they are doing in their respective fields. She was Visiting Artist and Teaching Fellow at St. Mary's College of Maryland during Fall Semester 2019.
2019 Arts & Entertainment Article