Jo Hardy – Dragon Driven Artist

Interviews at Maungakaramea with Theresa Sjoquist  1994/2014/2016

Youth

“I’m a messy worker,” said Jo Hardy in 1994. “Cigarette butts, apple cores, old mouldy coffee cups, lids off all the tubes and lost. From out of my chaos come excessively ordered images. Sharpened edges tidied obsessively are something I cannot resist. I’ve given up trying. I think it’s megalomania, a desire for control on the canvas since I can’t have it in life.”

Jo Hardy, artist, aka Joanne McNeill, writer, was a rare character who wielded with deft assurance both pen and paintbrush.

Claiming she had always been fat and argumentative, she realised early that she was never going to be demure and therefore needed to create another world in which she had some power.  Born Joanne Hardy, no middle names, to immigrant English parents in Christchurch on 15 February 1952, an Aquarian Dragon complete with eruptive fire and flamboyant magic, Hardy proceeded to create a world according to her own rules.

She had drawn and painted for as long as she could remember but it was discouraged because it made a mess. No paintings adorned the family walls, and making a hole in the wallpaper to hang one would have been quite out of the question.

“Mum blamed my Standard Four teacher for encouraging my interest in art. Frank Reed was a semi-abstract regional landscape painter. I didn’t like his paintings but I liked him – he could walk on his hands and was a bit of a wit.”

As a child, she was an avid reader, but the illustrations accompanying stories were too often disappointingly not the pictures she’d imagined. A keen swimmer, she also revelled in singing, including with the All Saints Anglican Church choir in Dunedin.

Music was a key construct throughout her life, and she instigated, and participated in numerous music nights and jam sessions over the years. Well into her fifties she taught herself to play guitar to a reasonably accomplished level.

At intermediate school, Hardy won a prize for art but at Otago Girls High she was streamed into the top class with a curriculum devoid of art.

“Drawing and painting became somewhat illicit.  I studied Latin, French, German, English and history…and wrote terrible poetry.  My Fifth Form English teacher, Patricia Guest, encouraged me to both write and paint.”

Transferred to Christchurch Girls High School, she hated it, but the curriculum included art. 

“I was horrified the teacher told me what to do – heresy!  I wagged a lot of school with Jane Arbuckle (later Jane Zusters) who introduced me to the Christchurch Art Gallery, Canterbury Museum and Provincial Council Chambers. I wanted to go to Ilam (School of Fine Art) but Dad wouldn’t support me at university, so studied at Teachers College (primary) because they paid $16 a week and provided studentships to university.”

An Artist Materialises

Now flatting Hardy quickly discovered sex, drugs, politics, and rock and roll. She joined demonstrations, shared with noisy flat-mates, argued in the cafeteria, and mixed with James K Baxter. From 1970-71 she attended Canterbury University on studentship, taking English, French, Education, Education Philosophy and History.  Returning to Teachers College in 1972 to specialise in art, she encountered Art lecturer, Quentin MacFarlane, a New Zealand painter of abstract marine landscapes.

“He taught me professional attitude, how to build stretchers, and stretch canvas, and he introduced me to the company of other artists.”

In 1973 Hardy began an arts degree at Ilam. “After years of illicit doodling in margins I felt permission was all I needed, so didn’t attend school often except for the off-life drawing sessions. Predictably I failed, and became Doris Lusk’s cautionary tale – student with great work who was failed for non-attendance. I passed Art History but there wasn’t an attendance requirement for that.”

Hardy moved to Whangarei with Stephanie Sheehan in 1975. They stayed with Yvonne Rust QSM, until they found accommodation but since they were both penniless Rust extended her legendary generosity to the young artists and had them put their groceries on her account for nine months until they were financially independent.

Having exhibited her paintings for the first time with other students in 1973, Hardy  continued to paint steadily and exhibit regularly, and by 1994, had notched seven solo shows and 71 group exhibitions from Christchurch, to Whangarei, Auckland, Kaitaia, Greymouth, and Tokoroa. She was awarded a QEII Arts Council grant of $2500 in 1975. She co-founded the Tangihua Dream Company in 1980 which operated the Polite Force Station Gallery in Whangarei. Artistic endeavours ensued for 36 years, including costume design, stage make-up, and the painting of theatre backdrops, stage props, murals, posters, invitations, signs, billboards, illustrations, ball decorations, and commissions.

Hardy married Mark Ivan McNeill in 1979, and their son, Giles Lowne McNeill, was born in 1980.

Challenged for painting time as a new mother, a friend babysat Giles once a week. A year later she had completed one painting (of Giles) which she gave to the friend in return for the babysitting. The help meant she continued as a painter.

Art and Writing – Twin Passions

Hardy’s connection with Yvonne Rust QSM, saw her involved with the inception of the now well-known Quarry Arts Centre in 1981 and maintaining a hands-on interest for many years including holding positions on the Northland Craft Trust which manages the Quarry.

As a response to the lack of feedback for exhibiting artists in Northland, in 1984 she instituted a weekly art criticism column in the Northern Advocate. She wrote the column until 1990.

That year, she was invited onto the Whangarei City Council’s Art Acquisition Committee which purchased artworks for the City’s art collection. The original donors had contributed works in 1923 on the proviso that a gallery was built to house the collection which had steadily grown, but by 1990 no gallery had eventuated.

Hardy tackled the problem with customary gusto and set about cataloguing the existing collection.

“I assembled the dispersed works at Forum North and hired Peter Riley to de-frame them so we could measure the actual size of the works, and then re-frame them. Arno Gasteiger photographed each piece. We did it all in ten days because the room couldn’t be spared for longer.”

Hearing by chance a radio interview with Friedensreich Hundertwasser in which he offered to design a public building for any town that would welcome it, Hardy saw an opportunity and became thereby the originator of the concept of a Hundertwasser Gallery for Whangarei. She went on to champion the cause with many others until 1994 when funding, and the provision of a suitable site, appeared to be impossible.

Working Artist

Hardy worked in a home studio which her father had created from the original chicken coop in the back paddock of their Maungakaramea home.

She habitually worked on the floor kneeling on a piece of old carpet unless the painting was so big she couldn’t reach the middle. Then she’d prop it up on bricks against a wall. Too impatient to wait for oils to dry, Hardy’s preferred medium was acrylics. Using thin, watery paint stained into raw canvas, she loved the effect, saying the water did all the work while she floated behind, dreaming.

She drew or sketched most days in bound, indexed drawing books as a form of visual note-taking. She built her own strainers, and enjoyed the process of stretching canvases as a meditation preparatory to work.

“My compositions are instinctual and I insist on doing everything by eye. Consequently my strainers are unlikely to be square, and therefore neither are the images. It’s magic, illusion and allusion – making something that seems to be there because we have learned to conjure meaning from marks. I prefer illusion to reality. Attempts to dispense with the image are doomed to failure, except among a few who share the same assumptions. People will see images anyway, and what they think they see has as much to do with what a painting becomes as what the artist intended.”

Her themes included, birth, death, memory, love, lust, motherhood, flight (she gave flying lessons in her dreams), water, shelter, dreams, and personal landscape.  Her quirky, colourful paintings daringly expressed her opinions, her sharp social commentary, and the lump and roll of response to a highly individual life.

Her work has been loosely categorised as magical hyperrealism, the bulk of which was signed Jo Hardy, but for a short time early on, some were signed, Jo Who?

“I have always had difficulty naming a price,” said Hardy, ‘and often barter or give my work away. I believe that if I’m doing a good job, I’ll be okay. I live on faith, manna from heaven, but lately I’ve developed more respect for others, so have succumbed to trying to support myself by writing articles for money. I consider it necessary for health to contribute to self, family and community and since I can’t bake a mean pav, I do school backdrops. Maungakaramea owns me in a way. I’m their artist – consulted and engaged on aesthetic matters such as what colours to paint their houses, signs, logos, gravestones, sports trophies, you name it – so I feel useful here.”

Friends who understood what ‘keeping going’ meant were a big help, and Hardy counted amongst them, Stephanie Sheehan, Pete Millington (Geekie), the late Yvonne Rust QSM, Christopher Saunders, and Tony Fomison. It was Fomison who advised her to call herself an artist.

Life Works

Works are held in the collections of Northland Society of Arts, Canterbury Society of Arts, Canterbury Public Library, Warwick Brown (Ak) Pty., Whangarei Art Museum, and many private collections in New Zealand, Australia, USA, UK, and Eire (Ireland).

Hardy was a trustee of the Whangarei Public Art Gallery Trust, a working member of the Canterbury Society of Arts, and was invited twice to exhibit with The Group. She executed the courtroom drawings for the Rainbow Warrior trial, and was a weekly opinion columnist for the Northern Advocate from 2000 until July 2016.

Boarding her Dragon

On 29 July 2016, Joanne Hardy died of cancer left undiagnosed through her reluctance to visit a doctor for nineteen years, until the cancer sent secondaries and crippled her with pain. She was laid to rest next to her husband at Snooks Cemetery Maungakaramea.

Copyright Theresa Sjoquist – December 2016