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closeA glimpse inside the work of Harlan Hubbard: lifestyle, landscapes and a love of nature
By Heather Castro Contributing Art Critic
Kentucky artist Harlan Hubbards post-impressionist style and focus on nature is evident in his painting Springdale, on display at Hopewell Museum. Photo courtesy of Hopewell Museum
IF YOU GO: Harlan Hubbard: A Life in the Landscape
PARIS — Though Kentucky artist Harlan Hubbard is known for his post-impressionistic vistas of Kentucky landscapes, his close-to-nature lifestyle reflects current ideas of carbon footprints and recycling. An exhibit of works by this solitary and celebrated artist, who had ideas half a century ago that are in vogue today.
”As many people who have visited are interested in Hubbard's self-sustaining lifestyle as in his art,“ says Nancy Smith, executive director of the Hopewell Museum, where the exhibit Harlan Hubbard: A Life in the Landscape, closes this weekend. ”One visitor shared a story about acquiring a Hubbard painting by trading something that he needed — the barter system at work.“
Born in Bellevue, Hubbard later moved with his family to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he gained a solid background in art at the National Academy of Design. He also studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
This training is evident in his paintings. Solidly post-impressionistic in nature, they vaguely resemble, through style and paint application, artists like Van Gogh. Hubbard's Atchafalaya River, in particular, brings the post-impressionistic love of impasto paint and thick layers into a bayou-side view of a red house and a canoe heading upriver.
The true-to-life nature of Hubbard's works is easily explained. Hubbard and his wife, Anna, lived a riverboat life for six years, traveling from Cincinnati to New Orleans. Along the way, Hubbard sketched — painting was too difficult on the boat — and created magnificent woodcuts, a few of which are on exhibit with the paintings.
At the end of their journey, the Hubbards settled in Kentucky, in Payne Hollow, to live a self-sustaining lifestyle until their deaths, hers in 1986 and his in 1988. This need to live close to unspoiled nature is reflected in Hubbard's landscapes but also is apparent in his framing techniques.
Typically, frames have little to do with artwork. In the generically titled Harlan in the Garden, Hubbard's use of weathered, rough-hewn, reclaimed wood for the frame makes almost a window frame into the vista of yesteryear, a frame showing a carefully shadowed white riverboat in the water, with a small figure in blue tilling the viewer's side of the bank and loosely brushed wild nature on the river's opposite side.
In reminding viewers that a great Kentucky artist spent his life walking, growing vegetables and building or trading for what he needed, all to preserve the beauty he saw around him, Hubbard offers us a wealth of art to appreciate and a model to do the same.