Gabryel Harrison
Things Remembered From My Time On Earth
cover image Gabryel Harrison, Ferrous Red (detail), 2014. Oil on canvas, 24 x 24� Artwork images courtesy of Winsor Gallery and Gabryel Harrison. Installation images courtesy of Vanessa Brown.
gabryel harrison Things Remembered From My Time On Earth
Published in conjunction with the exhibtion Gabryel Harrison Things Remembered From My Time On Earth Winsor Gallery October 16 – November 15, 2014
winsor gallery 258 East 1st Avenue Vancouver, BC V5T 1A6 – info@winsorgallery.com winsorgallery.com
To Be Wild And Perfect, 2014, oil on canvas, 24 x 24” Speaking of Longing, 2014, oil on canvas, 24 x 24”
Gabryel Harrison on Things Remembered From My Time On Earth Flowers, and of their myriad variety, the rose, oh irresistible rose that so exemplifies our mortality. In this series I use umbers, rusts, greys and blacks to energise and contrast the whites and cream of petals, playing light against gravity. The gravity I feel, even in the polarity of luminosity that describes the arc of our human condition. I continue to embrace the bleeding and flowing of paint, the drips and splashes, the gestural mark to create a tension between the ordered and the wild, much as I meet my life, with an invitation to chance in the simultaneous act of planning, ordering and blindly feeling my way toward an outcome surely to be different than the one I imagined. Like the sunflower paintings in their uniqueness, radiating ochres and golds amongst mostly white florals who came unbidden and refused to be ignored. They are giants in my garden, like the painters who have made them famous; Schiele, Van Gogh, I, like the sunflowers am turning my face to the source and nodding. Thank you Rilke, thank you Twombly.
Birches, 2014, oil on canvas, 43 x 43�
The Land, the Water, The Light. the Space These paintings are a study begun long before the first paintings came into form. I have either lived or worked by the edge of the Fraser River for the last 20 years and before this, played and wandered in small towns by different seas. These meditations are not meant to represent a physical location, not this particular piece of the stream but simply, meditations on the notions of memory, imagination, feelings and their fleeting passage. They are evocations of place as felt experience, encoded in my cellular memory. The land, once listened to, made anew in this primal, viscous material of paint. Space and light. I am drawn to paint space in the century of its disappearance. Space, like silence is a resource, a sanctuary that is being consumed with precious little possibility of renewal. It has been measured. Not one square inch of silence is left undisturbed by the sounds of humanity. And light. Always the light. I want to make it visible. The light into which you may imagine your own disappearance. The light that lifts you, draws you on. The light we, in our most wholly embodied presence, radiate.
Journey, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 72�
Beyond the Visible, 2014, oil on canvas, 58 x 65�
Vast the Sky, 2014, oil on canvas, 58 x 65�
Torches on a Dark Branch, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 60” previous page Open to the Light, 2014, oil on canvas, 38 x 54”
Fragrant Anguish, 2014, oil on canvas, 39 x 24�
Tempest, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 72�
Tulips, 2014, oil on canvas, 58 x 65”
Camellia, 2014, oil on canvas, 58 x 65�
Fragile We Rise and Fall, 2014, oil on canvas, 58 x 65�
Edge, 2014, oil on canvas, 58 x 65”
All Waves Find The Shore, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 48�
Sisutil and the Sea, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 72�
We Are All Shining Like The Sun, 2014, oil on canvas, 40 x 56�
Like Battered Crowns, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 30�
White Stars, 2014, oil on canvas, 54 x 38�
Osmosis of Roses, 2014, oil on canvas, 54 x 38�
Winter Harbour, 2014, oil on canvas, 24 x 24�
Waterfall, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 40�