Karl Hartman: The Nature of Nature

Garvey|Simon is pleased to present The Nature of Nature, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by Karl Hartman. With meticulous technique and a softly surreal quality, Hartman transforms familiar scenes into meditations on perception, wonder, and the delicate balance between humanity and the natural world.

Hartman’s imagery evokes the vast skies and open fields of the prairies of his youth as well as the forests of the present. His paintings capture fleeting moments—whorls of clouds over a shimmering lake, a storm front looming over a country road, or milkweed seeds spiraling into the air—with an almost scientific precision and poetic sensibility. Drawing on his dual background as both artist and geologist, Hartman approaches the land not merely as subject but as an active, living process. The influence of my experience as a geologist,” he writes, “was to further value close observation of my environment… and gain an appreciation for natural history as well as what is unique.   -- 2025 artist statement

Hartman’s artistic practice balances disciplined observation with his own intuition. His compositions often begin as simple sketches drawn from memory and photographs of meaningful locations, then develop through multiple layers of oil paint into dreamlike visions of everyday scenes, transformed by light and weather. The artist’s reverence for natural processes—erosion, growth, decay, and transformation— is seen most in his paintings of forest life.

Hartman’s work embodies what Emerson described as the “harmony of both”—the meeting of human perception and natural beauty. His paintings do not idealize nature as distant or untouchable but rather invite viewers into moments of quiet transcendence found in the familiar. It is the harmony and joyous surprise found there—on the plains or in the woods—that often triggers a concept for a painting.

Through his frozen-in-time imagery, Hartman reminds us that wonder is not the domain of the exotic or the faraway—it lies, instead, in our attentiveness to the world around us.