Haunting
antique shops and estate sales, Rick Hards rescues the old-fashioned tintype
photographs that form the sturdy underpinnings of his paintings, resurrecting
and reincarnating their long-forgotten subjects. In this manner he is able to
recreate the subject's world, making an old reality into a new dream. With the
artist's automatic intervention, they are reborn in new manifestations that
explore the connection between man and other creatures, or between man and the
universe itself. In the process, Hards reinvents these once loved, abandoned
souls, breathing new life into the faded faces that remorselessly gaze back
at the viewer.
