LOUISE HARDY

Louise Hardy graduated with a Fine Art degree from Ruskin School at Oxford University. She was awarded a travel scholarship to paint in Southern Israel resulting in a sell-out London show on her return. Regular exhibitions have followed since, overseas and in and around London, where she works from a studio at the bottom of her garden. Her work is held in private and public collections, both nationally and internationally, including major purchases by Reuters and the former Financial Services Authority in Canary Wharf. She has shown successfully at Battersea’s Affordable Art Fair and several times at the Society of Women Artists Open Submission Summer Show at the Mall Galleries. She resumes her studies in late 2021 with a Masters Degree in painting at City and Guilds Art School, London.

Having worked in the capital for over thirty years in the shadow of Canary Wharf, Hardy’s fascination with the River Thames and London’s emerging skyline has been a constant theme in her paintings. Previously made in situ, her recent work uses as a starting point found aerial imagery of cities cleaved in two by the meanders of great rivers. Her semi-abstract works are filled with a jumble of architectural topography, sometimes war-torn, often over-developed and unsettlingly emptied of people. This tilted, vertiginous perspective invites the viewer to soar above but at the same time, be drawn in. The artists’s meticulous process of translucent layering speaks of her love of paint, and a physicality that leaves a history of mark-making and experiment. The work is intended to be uplifting and evocative, its colours saturated and luminous but whose transient atmosphere threatens, as if a storm might be just about to break on the horizon.

Louise Hardy has an unusually broad range of artistic style and expression, and I have chosen a selection from her drawings, inks and oils to show this breadth. More to come, so stay tuned. A detail that delighted me was that she received a scholarship from Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Museum. (Vaporetto HIPPOPOTAMO’s home, and one on my favourite museums).

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