Enjoying the world of watercolors

And paint he did. Everything he saw was an inspiration -- Washington Square Park, the river, the rooftops, city life. He had two shows at the Ferargil Galleries in New York City in 1937 and 1938 and was kept busy with illustrations and posters as well. In later years, his fellow artists in the Fairfield Watercolor Group in Connecticut would kid him that while most of them had to travel far and wide to find something worthy to paint, Hardie would simply look around him for inspiration: the house across the street, the back fields, a neighbor's trees, the grape arbor. When we look at his early watercolors, we note the same artistic eye that could see form and direction wherever he painted.

In 1972 Hardie and Dorothea were being interviewed on the radio station of Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, and he described why he loved to paint; and it's easy to be caught up in his enthusiasm for his medium:

"I love doing watercolors. I love to go out on a nice sunny day and it's an amazing thing to me that you can do a painting and get it complete. A watercolor is a very fast medium anyway, and a completion of a painting seems to make all the difference in the world. You have an idea and it's completed and there's a satisfied feeling that you have done something. I have friends who are in professions where cases drag on unresolved for months, but they will come out and paint a picture in one day and there's a wholeness, a feeling that they are whole again in such a short time."