On Garde

Although Harold Garde sees his personal life as pretty conventional, his art life is all about taking chances: fresh, raw, and in your face about beauty. He lives on a quiet residential street near downtown Belfast, with a sweet kitchen, a comfy porch, and a bedroom that adjoins a large upstairs studio of wide wood floorboards and white walls, daylight streaming in onto, this day, a large unstretched canvas tacked to the wall, splotched with patches of purples and greens and blues.

Every day this is where he continues to add to the enormous body of work that is Harold Garde: over a thousand canvases and an estimated 4,000 works on paper, organized and filed by medium, subject, and time period. Even more are housed in his New Smyrna Beach, Florida, studio, where he works each winter.

Born in Brooklyn in 1923, Garde grew up primarily in the Bronx and graduated from the prestigious Stuyvesant High School. He went on to the College of the City of New York as a science major, followed by a stint in the Army Air Force during World War II, which gave him the gift of the GI Bill and the University of Wyoming at Laramie, where he discovered art. His formal education was completed with a master’s in fine art and art education from Columbia, which he put to work teaching. When he retired in 1984, luck, he says, brought him to Belfast and a thriving art community.
Harold Garde has worked in acrylics for decades and is an accomplished printmaker. He is also responsible for a technique he named “strappo.” It’s been recognized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the only printmaking technique that doesn’t depend on the transfer of wet material into the paper or result in a mirror image.

Garde often works in series—vessels, kimonos, pinnacles, chairs—sometimes producing hundreds of pieces in each one, although not in sequence nor to create a specific “exhibit” or body of work. Garde is an explorer, and so he can do nothing but keep exploring, the individual and the universal, as well as their intersection.

He has exhibited in many galleries and museums and has work in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Museum, the Fine Arts Museum of New Mexico, the Museum of Florida Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, among others.

Earlier this year, the Museum of Florida Art produced a retrospective of over 130 works, Harold Garde. Painting. 50 Years, as well as a monograph of the same title. In conjunction with the exhibition, Dale Schierholt made the film Harold Garde: Working Artist. A new director’s cut premiered at the Colonial Theatre in Belfast in September. In March 2010, much of the work will be part of a new exhibit at the University of Wyoming Museum of Art, where Garde was a student 60 years ago.

Garde says, “Every work is a battle, every finished piece a battle scar.” Although he would often rather be anywhere else—“drinking martinis, on the Riviera, with wonderful women”—this is where he must be, in the studio, every day, with the goal of making a “good” painting. A good painting, he says, is one that goes somewhere that the other paintings have not.

What was your childhood like?

It wasn’t until I was in high school that the New York housing shortage made sure that my mother’s gypsy instincts to inhabit a different apartment every hour came to an end. Moving around as much as we did, I didn’t have any sustained friendships. But I had an older sister I adored who was very precocious. She was the sign of America to me. She and her friends in the theater built great respect in me for cultural things—without any real understanding of what any of it meant. She took me to plays and introduced me to things as exotic as Chinese food.

Was art part of your growing-up years?

The simple answer is no. I had a very overprotective mother, but as long as I asked even a stranger to help me cross the busy street to Bronx Park, I was allowed to wander there by myself all the time. They had outdoor performances—puppet shows, Gilbert and Sullivan productions, an operetta, and so much more.

What did your folks do?

My mother was a custom dressmaker. She could do everything; she made the patterns, and clients would send carriages around for her. My father was a pocketbook framer who worked in a factory. I know so little of their background. They were immigrants. They met here. I wonder why I didn’t ask questions, but really they didn’t want to talk. It was a new life. It took me a while to know that Aunt Sarah was just somebody my mother met on the boat coming over.

The University of Wyoming was a far cry from New York City.

You’re right. The town was only 50 years old, but it was the right place for me. That’s where I really started to paint. While I figured out what I wanted to do, it seemed like a good idea to just take some art courses. I fell in love. I never got out of the studio. And at the time art hadn’t yet turned academic. The teachers were practicing artists. George McNeil was the painting teacher. He’d been one of Hans Hoffman’s assistants, along with Jackson Pollock. So I got to hear the stories, about how wild and crazy the production of art could be—how absolutely marvelous it all was to me.

Have you ever shown much in New York?

At the time that I could have and would have and should have, I didn’t have the confidence or the freedom or the natural connections. I didn’t know how it would fit into being a married man, how it would fit into being a father, how it would fit into being a wage earner—all these things. It became very clear that this was a tough way to support yourself. It was like being dropped into an ocean and not knowing how I was supposed to function in that world.

Is that a plus or a minus?

I can’t really answer that. I can only say, I like where I am. I can’t hate how I got here. If I like what I am, I cannot not like the road that got me here.

In your work, you sort of force us to pay attention to our imbalances.

I keep saying I appeal to the restless eye. I make pictures but the pictures I make are not the pictures you anticipate. Do you look at it, come to rest at one point, and when you return to it, it never reveals anything else? Then I don’t think I’ve been successful. If I’ve done a good job, it should reward the viewer the opportunity to see more.

Is there a time in the process of making a painting that is more exciting for you than any other?

Yes, yes, yes. When I get up the next morning and I go back and look at it and I get the double whammy. I say, “Damn, there isn’t another thing I know how to do with this.”

You’ve said it’s never wrong to make a change in a painting.

It is never, never wrong to make a change in a painting. People who have predecided what the thing will look like will make changes only to fit a preconception. So there’s no real learning in there. Unless it’s everything you can make it be, it’s not finished, and if you are making changes, you are not satisfied with it. It’s not finished. When you get the guts to make changes to something you like, chances are you’ve made a much better painting.

Are you always discovering something new?

Always. I’m reexamining what it is that makes a painting. What makes it a statement. What makes it communicate. “Ah, that’s a painting.” “And that’s a painting.” Now a painting is redefined. And every time, I want to redefine what the limits are of a painting. Some things I won’t challenge, like a rectangle or the composition of the paint itself. I don’t want the painting to be unsettling but if they’re not unsettling, I don’t like that either.

Talk about courage in art making.

It’s the most fearsome thing, every new canvas. That doesn’t get easier. I try to walk the edges of things and there’s always the fear that I’ve lost it, I’ll never do another good one. Picasso lied when he said, “When you’re stuck, do whatever’s easy.” Nothing is easy. The nicest compliment I have ever had is the idea that I give other artists courage.