Daily Times

Hardy’s house-marked landscapes and figure-inhabited interiors, on the other hand, feature far more brain than brawn. His portraits are astounding in their clarity and personal poignancy. His 1977 “The Doctor (Robert Andrew Johnson),” for example, is an extraordinary, high-finished example of a traditional portrait in the wake of 19th century French painting – a horizontal canvas, masterfully realistic however quietly handled, with the soberly serious sitter relaxing in a Victorian chair, propped to the left but visually leaning to the right, crossed legged with one foot cropped. Yet Hardy’s 1964 “Portrait of Billie (Isabel Lewando)” is a gorgeous wisp of an image. A few deft but liminally soft pencil marks lay out the subject’s head, neck and hands so perfectly that we can’t help but see the rest of her on the Whistler-esque page. Hardy’s watercolor strokes only appear in her face and fingers, with just the slightest hint of mass and visual weight at the back of her elegantly short-cropped hair. However gossamer, the painting is almost deliriously beautiful, like an extraordinary memory that will insist on weathering the ages.