Two years ago, I wrote one of my first art reviews for this paper about the painter Harold Garde. The works then on display at Waterfall Arts in Belfast, where Garde maintained a summer studio (he lives the rest of the year in Florida), were astonishing for many reasons, not least of which was their sheer size. Six and seven feet across, with large looping brushstrokes, it was amazing to me that a man of 97 could produce something of this scale and vigor.

At the opening of “Harold Garde: American Expressionist,” his retrospective now at Cove Street Arts (through July 9), I finally met Garde and was bowled over in a wholly different way: He had traveled up from Florida – at age 99! – to attend. He looked much younger than his years, and he stood a long time, albeit with the support of a walker, before accepting a seat. “I think we’ve seen the last of those,” he allowed about the Waterfall Arts paintings, admitting they were a bit more than he could physically handle (but just a bit).

There are none of those pieces here, but what is here articulates a portrait of a restless, resilient artist who has forged a very unique style and experimented in ways that yielded a completely new printing technique. Many paintings date to the 1990s, one to 1967 (“Lurch”). The show also includes a generous amount of strappos. This is the print technique Garde is credited with inventing, developing and naming (at least according to Wikipedia; Garde himself more humbly uses the term “developed”).

It is wonderful to see these many strappos because it shows the breadth possible with this innovative process. Garde told me he liked to mix his acrylic paints on a piece of glass. When they dried, he was able to peel them right off the nonporous glass so he could mix a new palette of colors. At some point in the 1980s, it occurred to him that he could actually create works right on the glass (or other nonporous surfaces), peel them off and apply them to paper. He could also apply these monotypes onto other works, layering them until he was satisfied with the resulting image.

You might think, why bother creating a painting and simply transferring it to another surface rather than just creating it on that other surface? But think, for a moment, how a strappo alters the creative process. In a sense, a strappo turns the artist’s mind inside out, forcing him to work almost in reverse. You cannot, for example, paint the background and then paint landscapes or figures onto it. You have to paint the subject matter first and the background later. Otherwise, when you transfer the image, all you’ll see is background.

This is manna for a curious mind like Garde’s. It requires forethought when layering the imagery in a way that conventional painting does not. It also creates unique effects in the quality of the paint. As the show’s title states, Garde is an expressionist, a style that relies heavily on free, often spontaneous gesture. In this form of printing, you see the brushstrokes clearly. But the paint often reacts in less expected ways because the surface he is painting on is not absorptive.

Take “Untitled (Yellow Kimono)” from 2013. When Garde applied this paint to the glass, it clearly did not adhere evenly. Rather, it created a network of fine capillaries that preserved the liquid quality of paint on the transferred image. The scientific name for this phenomenon is thermo-capillary convection, or what oenophiles refer to more commonly as a wine’s “legs.” The effect makes the kimono look almost ghostly, as if it is hovering between manifestation and non-manifestation.

The same happens on my favorite strappo “Untitled Work on Paper No. 150.” Two red forms in the foreground exhibit this quality, appearing as a tree, bush or veined leaf forms, or perhaps a form of microscopic life. Other flecks of red seem to be airborne around them, flashing quickly by. The gestural brushstrokes behind them imply either a rushing horizontal movement of currents or some intimation of landscape. It’s a jewel of a piece and reminiscent, in an abstract way, of the work of Yves Tanguy.

The Tanguy reference, whether intentional or (most probably) not, is of a piece with Garde’s aesthetic predilections. Faces and bodies seem to melt and morph. Many float in indeterminate mediums. One, in the painting “Sage,” seems to contain a landscape in his head.

The paintings are boldly colored and palpably emotive. Garde’s interest in the human figure and, specifically heads, pervades many works. A good number of them telegraph complex, yet often inscrutable, mixes of emotions. “Self Portrait As a Stranger” from 1987 is one such painting. The title implies the artist is a stranger – but to whom? To himself? To others? To the art world? To a loved one? We don’t really know. What is discernible is the subject’s multiple layers of sadness, loneliness, wistfulness, longing and an almost childlike innocence. This figure is tremendously affecting. It made me want to hold and comfort him.

The painting “Reverie” seems nothing of the kind. Both figures here are unsmiling and might appear to have no affect. But one senses that the behind their hollow gaze, there is a universe of thoughts, dreams, desires. All these figural pieces exude vulnerability, the quality that more or less defines our humanity. It is a form of openness that allows the world of our feelings in, instead of walling off or shutting down what most distinguishes us from other creatures.

Within that vulnerability lies a lot of ambiguity, a dominant thread throughout Garde’s work. In the materials for the Waterfall Arts show two years ago, he said the paintings were intentionally “incomplete” so the viewer could complete them. I suggested then that “completing” them was beside the point because it would fix our ideas about them instead of allowing them to breathe and live in a universe of possibility.

That universe allows multiple readings of them at different times, depending on where we, ourselves, are. They might elicit one thing from us when we are feeling blue, an entirely different interpretation when we are feeling strong and confident. They become vessels onto which we can project ourselves, allowing us to become witnesses, a kind of remove from our enmeshed sense of self.

From that perspective, we are invited to contemplate who and what we are. In a way, they are all like the strappos – once removed from their initial state of creation and existence, which gives us an opportunity to consider that we, too, are constantly morphing from one state to the next, one form to another, part of the perpetually spontaneous creation of reality.

Garde thus transforms the act of painting into one of contemplation for the viewer – not just of the images themselves and their hidden meanings, but of ourselves and of the nature of our being.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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