DON ED HARDY ART

Dream Cards

My father was a professional photographer, and I was familiar with photo negatives—hypnotic and mysterious—from a very early age.

In Japan in the 1990’s I saw an ancient Buddhist scroll painted in gold and silver on deep indigo paper. Their reversed values and complex narratives were mesmerizing.

Years later, I began working on Japanese “poem cards”— metallic linear work on dark grounds. Drawing this way relates to my extensive work in etching, where a sharp stylus is drawn through a dark wax ground to reveal the bright metal plate beneath. To me these are Dream Cards.