Between Flesh and Forest

Pontone Gallery assembles an exclusive collection of dynamic new works on paper by British artist, Richard Harrison. An exuberant manipulator of various media, particularly paint, Harrison grasps this opportunity to work rapidly and directly to explore personally significant motifs of the abstracted landscape and the isolated and ‘enmeshed’ figure. A recent move to the Scottish countryside has prompted a significant and fertile urgency to his work, where his direct experience of being in the landscape has re-focussed his creative attention on what it means to be a self-confessed ‘Romantic Expressionist’.

These works are rendered in a wide variety of drawing and painting materials on stout sheets of rag paper. The artist operates an almost greedy appropriation of what comes to hand: liquid combinations of watercolor, gouache, ink and acrylic paint are accompanied and complemented by graphic manipulations of pencil, charcoal and oil pastel. This deployment of such a wide panoply of technique speaks of a highly charged engagement with the process and sense of enquiry into his disparate methods of application.

In conversation, Harrison mentions a return to life drawing, which informs the subject matter of many of these studies. He takes profound and sensual enjoyment in his robust delineations of the forms of the body, particularly the female. Figures appear in the landscape, which is sometimes observed, sometimes abstracted. In other cases the subject hovers in a completely indeterminate void, unmoored and solitary. These detached and possibly alienated figures make overt reference to those of the Romantic imagination. At the same time their vigorous and lively handling underlines their emotional and expressive import.
The artist is keen to confront themes of melancholy, sorrow and loss. His landscapes, in their protean starkness and schemas of richly-coloured, dramatic composition allude to ‘the sublime’ where nature is both terrible and awesome. Harrison’s new found physical and psychic immersion in such a place enables him to draw on a deep well of intensely-felt inspiration.