Hardmeat's Later Manner

Sixty and seventy years ago Hardmeat’s later manner both heightened and met a new appetite for hectic, humidly insistent and telepathic effects that only gobs of paint might induce in a population weary of impressionistic parrots and heavyset violinists dressed in libidinal candy wrappers. This was paint that talked, that opened the great mouth of pictorial blood and swallowed little children when no one was looking. It was reported that these very same children grew up to be surgeons and dentists, while others morosely wandered London’s streets muttering phrases from French symbolist poetry and occasionally breaking out in ancient Celtic folk songs. Later, when Hardmeat began producing diaphanous iridescences the effect was more antiquarian and people felt more like birds, flitting about one another with the great black wings of a public gone mad with the thermodynamics of an aesthetics enriched by decorative molding and good scotch whiskey. Never before or after the 1900s did the precious so quickly become that ebullient little bounce everyone sought to put in their step, that jaunty little hitch that let people know you’d just been to the art gallery and seen a genuine Hardmeat throbbing on the wall like a giant improbability of wrinkled gizzards and weary stigmata. By 1920, Hardmeat’s later art had acquired a eat-as-much-as-you-can buffet style. People complained their eyes felt fat. The avant-garde reveled in mackinaws and talked incessantly of unfulfilled needs and the weird patterning on the handles of forks. Only now – with all the art studios full of busy delicacies and zinc yo-yos – have all these period associations found a lush & distant blue on the canvas of the future. Worldly success would have to wait. Hardmeat’s attitude was never an impatient one. It would be more accurate to call it a raw sienna in search of a scrapbook. You know the feeling: you wait a long time, and then it happens, newly felt sensations lengthen into moments of tremendous subtlety and the world begins to feel tenable again, the way it did in one’s youth, when the fog draped the early morning orchards in its gauze and potentiated the fragrance of fruit rotting on the hard October ground. For there is an October of the heart, a spacious realization of curios and peculiar emotions, the golden stool of Ghana or those nicely unhurried moments in Kerouac’s writing where the Hardmeats of the world come to a small town and stop for some gas and beer and get out to stretch their legs and gaze at the hills. And that’s it, that’s the place Hardmeat intended: he never stopped yearning for the final admission to the salon of absolution. And today we see Hardmeat in the truest sense imaginable, which is to say we’re all looking for someone to provide us with a vision as piquant as Hardmeat. We see him still, stocky & bearded, weatherbeaten, lacking in social graces, setting out each day to paint in the open air & cut space open with a sharp eye & a silken brush. And the air is still. And the paint is thick as heaven.