What would Harold Garde like to burn down? “Probably everything,” said the abstract artist sitting in his New Smyrna Beach home.
At 95, Garde is thinking of the next generation. “I think civilization screws you younger guys, and you’re all younger than me,” he said. “It screws the even younger ones even more.”
Garde’s latest exhibit is called “Burn This Down: Reflections on the Art World,” opening at the Mills Gallery on Friday, April 5. But his complaints extend well past the wrongs in the realm of art.
“Finding ways for the individual to have real discretionary thinking is so against everything we do and everything we make,” said Garde.
Garde knows first-hand what investment in the individual can produce. As a solo artist, he’s had art exhibited in galleries from New York to Mexico to the Orlando Museum of Art. Though he eschews the word inventor, he is credited with naming and developing the Strappo technique of printmaking, wherein images are lifted off of glass onto another canvas.
But Garde gives credit to the many ways he was helped along his road.
The child of Polish immigrants, he was born in New York in 1923. Some of his earliest memories are set in the Great Depression.
“It meant very little to me except that my mother took pride in being frugal,” he said.
(Worth noting: Garde refers to his memories as “the stranger who walks through [his] history.”)
Down the street from his Bronx apartment was a theater built by the Works Progress Administration, part of FDR’s New Deal. “Cultural things were free,” said Garde. “It was a way of sustaining our society.”
At this publicly funded theater, Garde watched everything from puppet shows to Shakespeare.
“I understood the arts were a worthy thing to do,” he said. “With immigrant parents, it was very important to get to know and be part of the American world. And that strongly included the idea of being selective in what was entertainment.”
After serving in the Pacific in World War II, Garde married and went to study art in Wyoming, paid for by the GI Bill. “The GI Bill, of course, reinvented America,” he said.
At school, Garde discovered new ideas happening to art as he graduated. “The art world was in the most exciting time,” he said. “European excitement was leading to non-figurative work.”
A teacher at several points in his history, Garde gets particularly perturbed thinking about the modern state of education. “We had the local stores … and their kids went on to become the accountants and the doctors and the professionals because of school,” he said. “Part of what makes me so angry is that it was possible to do that without being wealthy. And now you young guys get screwed. To get an education, you walk out with debt. And if the job market has shifted, so what? The debt hasn’t.”
This is the crux — the kindling — of Garde’s “Burn This Down” fire. “I think the hopes have become dreams instead of true ambitions,” he said. “It has become competitive where it should be cooperative. I think the arts show it. I think the idea is everything is to be measured by money and we internalize that, which is even worse.”
Garde doesn’t let media off the hook, putting part of the blame on a lack of reporting about arts happenings. “We don’t get the coverage we should have,” he said. “We don’t have the displays of real support. And it’s getting worse and worse in the schools.”
Garde says that all interest in his shows now starts with his age. “That’s the first thing they want to talk about,” he said. And it plays into his own work these days. “I have to see my work differently than I did before,” he said. “I no longer have the same feeling that I did before that I might come back in three years or five years to complete something.
“The likelihood is that I’m not going to see much of the work that I do now while I’m still alive. And I’m sure as hell not going to see it when I’m dead. I promise. I’m going to be completely dead.”
Garde just hopes that he leaves an ember burning before he goes.
Garde is scheduled to attend the reception for “Burn This Down: Reflections on the Art World” at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, April 5. The Mills Gallery is located at 1650 N. Mills Ave. in Orlando. Admission is free. For details, call 407-234-7033.
