Fran Hardy

Fran Hardy has had six solo museum exhibitions including a 15 year retrospective. Some of the permanent collections that contain her work are Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, the Museum of Florida Art, the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art and the Brevard Museum of Art and Science. She received a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship and has had two documentaries on her work airing on PBS in Florida.

Fran Hardy’s work explores how the ancient inspires the contemporary as well as blurring the boundaries between realism and abstraction. She draws from her experience in a wide variety of media and uses techniques from the distant past such as intaglio printing and the early renaissance technique of oil over egg tempera. Ancient trees and primordial plants provide symbolism and fertile material for her works as well as symbols that emerge from the abstract ‘ooze’ with references from ancient cultures such as sacred math and petroglyphs. She begins with drawings in pencil and graphite often on gessoed panel that writhe with an unearthly intensity. The realistic element in these detailed drawings is juxtaposed with abstract compositions rendered in a variety of media from egg tempera and India ink to oil pastel over watercolor as well as watercolor, graphite and encaustic. Nature is the inspiration and she draws from a number of sources. ‘The Staghorn Series’ explores the cycles of aging through the evolution of a staghorn fern. Another series of paintings melds the inspiration of Navajo textiles with the plants of the Southwest, her new home. A third series entitled the”Ancient Ones” centers around very elaborate, otherworldly large scale drawings of ancient trees and their interpretation into paintings which hover between abstraction and realism. Color has always been an important aspect of Hardy’s work and she uses it with exuberant abandon in this new work. Curator Madelon Sheedy at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art who gave her the first of her solo museum show has said of her work ”It is obvious that Fran Hardy paints what interests and inspires her, emphasizing the interplay between light and dark and forcing us to look at, rather than into or through the commonplace. The elegance in her work heightens the importance of the ephemeral and makes it timeless.”

Hardy and her husband, a television cameraman and producer purchased one of the original American French Tool presses made by Andre Beaudoin with a 44” x 80” press bed and have begun experimenting with the ancient art of intaglio printmaking in large format. The jewel-like drawings translate well into this medium. Scratching into the copper plates has inspired the oil pastel over watercolor paintings where she scribes through the layers of oil pastel to reveal the watercolor and render the elaborate drawings of her paintings with their abstract and realist underpinnings. She often uses mirror images to create a Rorschach-like mystery open to the viewer’s interpretation

Originally inspired to pursue oil over egg tempera by Giovannis Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” (in the permanent collection of the Frick Museum in NYC), Ms Hardy studied at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design in NYC. She came to Florida from a 51acre farm she shared with her husband in Pennsylvania. She was drawn to Florida by childhood memories of visits to her grandparents who taught her a love of beauty and nature. She and her husband now reside on seven acres in Lamy, New Mexico.

Ken Rollins, Director of the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo Florida said about her Florida body of work in the exhibition catalog for her solo show “Fran Hardy is an exceptional painter. With a keen eye, and commitment to craftsmanship, Hardy has developed a style uniquely her own. Fran Hardy’s exquisite still lifes move beyond representation into an ethereal world that transcends mere documentation. As a contemporary master of an age-old technique, Fran Hardy’s work reaffirms the importance of painting in the 21st century.”