Richard Harrison
Distraction - Landscape
The critic Brian Sewell was an early champion of Harrison’s work. He recognised its committed, insistent nature and described the artist as a “visionary prophet” and his paintings as “big, bold, beautiful and threatening”.
A painting by Richard Harrison
Richard Harrison was born in 1954 to an unmarried mother and was adopted at 20 days old by a comfortable upper-middle class mercantile family from Liverpool. He was educated at Aysgarth School, a prep school in North Yorkshire, and at Harrow School, which Harrison describes as one of England's "finest prisons for adolescent boys”. He read Medieval History at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his degree in 1976. After several years of wandering and drift, which culminated in a three month spell in a drug re-habilitation clinic in the summer of 1984, he went on to complete BA and MA degrees in Painting at Chelsea School of Art in 1987 and 1988 respectively. His first solo show in 1990 at The Berkeley Square Gallery in London’s Mayfair district was greeted with great acclaim by Brian Sewell, who declared in London’s Evening Standard newspaper that “Harrison’s pictures are wholly contemporary and could be of no other time than ours, and yet, I suspect, such old masters as Goya, Rembrandt and Delacroix might recognise him as in some sense their heir”. Many solo shows in England and abroad have followed, and his monumental crucifixion triptych “At The End ... A Beginning” hangs in Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. Harrison began as an abstract painter with a convincing interest in texture, not only of paint, but even of the canvas on which he painted, which he frequently burned or charred ; in these, though they represented nothing, there was a mysterious link with the Rococo paintings of the eighteenth century. He then moved on through landscape and the figure to biblical and mythical narratives that were common among the European painters from the High Renaissance to the High Olympus of Victorian art. Temptation and the constant struggle between good and evil are themes that Harrison has returned to in recent figurative works, as is the other given in life, that one day death will be waiting around the corner. In his book “Nothing Wasted : The Paintings of Richard Harrison”, published in 2010, Brian Sewell concluded with, “We should look at him not as a painter comfortably settled in middle age, but as a young painter with at least as much ahead of him as in his past, a young painter of un diminishing turbulent enquiry, but with all the advantages of practice, maturity, education and broad experience”. Artist: Richard Harrison ww.richardharrisonart.com
In the contemporary world where various forms of social media constantly compete for our attention and distract us from the actual physical present, the artwork on show at One Carter Lane aims to bring the viewer into the moment. Taking aspects of the contemporary experience and the process of transforming an idea into a physical object, “It’s been a long, long time (2019)” synthesises the artist’s response to this encounter with the world. Whilst being informed by these multifarious aspects of the present day life, by the amount of fragmented masses of information that constantly interrupt and fill our conscious and subconscious minds in the digital age, the exhibited work aims at catching the viewers’ attention and focusses them mentally and physically into the here and now. An inner search to see in the exhibited abstract artwork the landscape that the artist depicted. The visual experience is uniquely capable of engaging the passerby and in conjunction with the architectural space of One Carter Lane aims at creating a moment of visual stimulation and distraction from the everyday.
“Too often in today’s material world, more and more people are becoming so distracted by their phones and social media, their computers, the pursuit of money and success, whatever “success” means, that they forget the beauty of nature and the simple things in life that are free and can bring joy, like the wind in the trees and the clouds in the sky, and the splendid colours of the natural world.
As the title of my 2019 painting declares, “It’s been a long,
long time” since such things were championed as providing the greatest satisfactions in life.”- Richard Harrison
“IT'S BEEN A LONG, LONG TIME” - 2019 - 183 x 213.5 cm - Oil on Linen - Price upon request
For any information please contact Elisa Martinelli E. info@artmoorhouse.com T. +447502211914
Artist: Richard Harrison ww.richardharrisonart.com
