A painter who also writes about art, Hearne Pardee has focused his investigations on the everyday landscape since moving to Davis in 2001. His color compositions and on-site paintings of houses, yards, and schools are inflected by memory. They combine the optical discipline of Josef Albers with the spatial improvisation of Hans Hofmann.

Pardee began painting on site in New York City in the 1970s, and subsequently worked from iconic American landscapes in Maine, New Mexico, California, and Alaska, striving to integrate European modernism with the American landscape tradition. These efforts now extend to the Pacific island of New Caledonia, where he has visited a rural village for over forty years and documented its changing neighborhoods.

Pardee curated the 1996 exhibition “Reinterpreting Landscape” for the Maier Museum of Art in Virginia and has contributed essays and reviews to Art in America, Art News, The Partisan Review, and other publications. He exhibits regularly at the Bowery Gallery in New York City.

He teaches courses in drawing and painting as well as in Space and Place and Contemporary Visual Culture.