Gabryel Harrison | The Arc of Our Disappearance

gabryel harrison The Arc of Our Disappearance

cover image: blood of flowers, 43 x 43�, oil on canvas, 2016 Artwork images courtesy of Winsor Gallery and Gsbryel Harrison

gabryel harrison The Arc of Our Dissapearance

Published in conjunction with the exhibtion Gabryel Harrison The Arc of Our Dissapearance Winsor Gallery May 28th – June 25th, 2016

winsor gallery 258 East 1st Avenue Vancouver, BC V5T 1A6 – info@winsorgallery.com winsorgallery.com

Rosebud, Piercing the Dark, 36 x 54�, oil ov canvas, 2016

Gabryel Harrison The Arc of Our Dissapearance “Every flower has its own cosmology, its own relationship to the foliage, to the air around it”.

-Jane Freilicher And every flower is perishable. Each one of our lives but a brief flowering.

All that we are and all that we love, part of a great current. a beautiful passing stream of ever vanishing stabilities. These paintings look at our passing. I consider the full life cycle of the flower as a reflection of our own temporality. We are born, we bloom we fade, we die and disappear from this world.

My paintings are reflections on the arc of this natural and beautiful passage.

Using oil sticks, paint and beeswax, scratches, scumbles and slung paint, I am inspired by intuition as much as intellect. I celebrate accident, inviting drips and smudges to evoke both decay and effulgence. I encourage a feeling of the sensual and visceral with painterly abstraction, balancing loose gestural brushstrokes with more realistic passages in painting form and void, flower and ground. Like the Japanese phrase “mono no aware”, meaning “beauty tinged with sadness”, I paint the flower and the death in the flower. I offer these paintings in the midst of a world comprised of ever increasing speed and volatility, as possibilities of quiet reflection on what it means to be alive and mortal.

Meditating on the ordinary subject of flowers, I can say as John Cage said of the flower paintings of Morris Graves, “…To the self-destructive inventions of civilization they are the replies of nature”.

Replies of Nature 43 x 43�

Oil on canvas 2016

Wind Sleeping in Mouths, 43 x 43�, oil on canvas, 2016

Cherish 30 x 40� oil on canvas 2016

“On the surface, Harrison’s paintings appear to be about what practitioners of Zen Buddhism may call ‘everyday suchness’ – the notion of perceiving an object only as it is, such as experiencing “a leaf purely as a leaf purely over a period of time” . The rose sheds its signifying layers, its syrupy cliché, and becomes only that: a rose. However, the latent themes in Harrison’s florals and landscapes, which seem darker and more evanescent than they have ever been, reach beyond the meditative ‘suchness’ of still life and into the phenomenological realm through gesture, colour, and poetry. […]

Into Great Stillness, 36 x 67�, oil on canvas, 2016

Ovid’s Garden, 43 x 43”, Oil on canvas, 2016

Forever Unfolding, 36 x 36�, oil on canvas, 2016

Song of Orpheus, 50 x 60” oil on canvas, 2016

For You, I Bought Peonies 28 x 28” Oil on canvas 2016

The beauty in Harrison’s paintings is marred – but not diminished – by crude drips and slashes that move her oeuvre out of the realm of representation and into that of experience. This sensation is owed as much to her use of colour as it does to her energetic stroke. […] Swathes of soft pinks and lavenders, golds and creams, remind us that colour “is not something daubed onto a pre-existing shape, filling a form”: it has its own, phenomenological form that we experience both a retinal and bodily manner. “ (Excerpt from Heart Wide Open by Alex MF Quicho.)

Passing Perfume, 50 x 60�, oil on canvas, 2016

Gabryel Harrison currently lives and works in Vancouver, B.C. Her work can be found in private collections across Canada, the US and abroad.

Fragrant Room, 36 x 36�, oil on canvas, 2016

Your One Beautiful Life, 26.75 x 53�, oil on canvas, 2016