This spring, CANDL Fine Art showed Bob Ray and Barbara Hardy, husband and wife, on the same wall in succession. Two solo exhibitions by two artists who have spent more than half a century looking at the world from adjacent rooms.
The shows stood on their own. Each artist worked alone, saw alone, and decided alone. But hung weeks apart in the same room at 1128 Broad Street, they began a conversation, one that outlasts the closing of both.
Two Studios, One Greenhouse
Bob and Barbara work apart. Two studios, two sets of habits, two ways of facing a blank surface. The day’s labour stays separate; only after the studios go dark do they meet in the greenhouse, where the two practices finally sit in the same light.
Same weather, same years. Yet the work could not look more different, and that difference is the point.
Where one reaches for colour, the other holds back. Where one builds, the other strips away. They work the same way without working alike: several canvases going at once, each refined over time, each piece informing the next on its own easel.
What crosses between them is language. Thirty years married, they keep a running conversation about the art in progress, spoken and unspoken, over coffee and across the yard. Neither paints to answer the other. But the conversation is always on.
Bob Ray: The Day Smell of Mother’s Spring
Bob’s exhibition came first, The Day Smell of Mother’s Spring. The title alone sets the register: a phrase that fuses the bodily and the seasonal, the remembered and the alive. Ray reaches for the thing beneath memory, sense before language, the first knowledge a body holds.
His figures carry that weight. Charcoal grounds the paint; a haloed form bears something dark across a worn field. Nothing is named, yet everything feels recalled from the body outward.
He draws every day. Landscapes, animals, trees, people, buildings, and other things caught in time and space. Each drawing is a finished work, not a study for a painting. The paintings stand apart. Same hand, two practices, different problems.
Barbara Hardy: What Memory Wears
Barbara’s show followed, What Memory Wears. The title does the work. Memory is not a photograph. It frays, fades, and dresses itself in whatever the present hands it.
Where Ray reaches beneath memory, Hardy paints the act of dressing it: the way a remembered room shifts colour, the way a face softens into feeling.
Weeks after Bob’s show came down, the same gallery wall took up Barbara’s. New work, new temperament, the contrast doing its own quiet argument.
Her surfaces reward patience. Up close the marks dissolve into gesture; at a distance they resolve into something you almost recognise, a moment you may have had, or only wished you had.
Seen Together
The exhibitions ran in succession, not side by side, so no single visit caught both on the wall at once. One came down, the other went up. The contrast had to be carried in memory across the gap between shows.
Viewed together now, the two bodies of work hold their distance and their long marriage at the same time. Two voices that never quite agree and never need to.
That is the work between them. Bob and Barbara, at CANDL Fine Art.