Richard Harrison
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”.
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
PULSAR, 2011 Oil on canvas 99 x 89 cm £ 6,750
was greeted with great acclaim by Brian Sewell, who declared in London’s Evening
TERMINUS III, 2014 Oil, acrylic, collage on canvas on plywood panel 61 x 56 cm £ 4,250
FROM THE DEEP, 2014 Oil, acrylic on linen 180 x 150 cm £ 12,500
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
TRIMLINE, 2014 Oil and acrylic on linen 122 x 152.5 cm £ 9,750
has returned to in recent figurative works, as is the other given in life, that one day
GORGE, 2014 Oil and acrylic on canvas on plywood panel 38.5 x 41 cm £ 3,250
THE SUMMIT, 2014 Oil on canvas on plywood panel 61 x 56 cm £ 4,250
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 undiminishing turbulent enquiry, but with all the advantages of practice, maturity, education and broad experience”.
ArtMoorHouse Elisa Martinelli E. info@artmoorhouse.com T. +447502211914
HELGAFEL, 2014 Oil and acrylic on linen 71 x 122 cm £ 6,750
IN A PURPLE PATCH, 2015 Oil on canvas 183 x 152.5 cm £ 12,500
FROZEN EARTH, 2015 Oil and acrylic on linen 71 x 122 cm £ 6,750
FOG, 2017 Oil on linen 101.5 x 91.5 cm £ 6,750
BEFORE THE WINTER, 2017 Oil on canvas 53 x 59 cm £ 4,250
MISTY MOUNTAIN, 2015 Oil on linen 152.5 x 183 cm £ 12,500
OVER THE HORIZON, 2017 Oil on canvas 100 x 90 cm £ 6,750
HENGE, 2017 Oil, collage on linen 91.5 x 101.5 cm £ 6,750
IF THE WORLD SHOUD END, 2017 Oil and acrylic on linen 180 x 150 cm £ 12,500
MOORLAND, 2017 Oil, collage on linen 48 x 54 cm £ 3,750
BACK TO THE GARDEN, 2018 Oil, collage on canvas 127 x 102 cm £ 7,500
THERE WAS WINTER IN MY HEART, 2019 Oil, acrylic on linen 160 x 180 cm £ 12,500
LAVA FLOW, 2015 Oil and acrylic on canvas on plywood panel 42 x 60 cm £ 3,250
THE FIRE DOWN BELOW, 2018 Oil on linen 213.5 x 183 cm £ 15,000
BREAKING WAVE, 2011 Oil, acrylic, pastel, charcoal on canvas 90 x 100 cm £ 6,750
MORAINE II, 2019 Oil on canvas on wood panel 15 x 15 cm £ 850
LATITUDE, 2019 Oil on canvas on wood panel 15 x 15 cm £ 850
GREEN DAY, 2019 Oil on canvas on wood panel 15 x 15 cm £ 850
THE SUN FADING LIGHT, 2017 Oil on linen 91.5 x 101.5 cm £ 6,750
