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“Soon to be fifty-five, Harrison’s intellectual house is now in as respectable order as his studio. It was a long time developing – his late discovery of himself as a painter meant that he was thirty-four when he confidently headed a new page in his journal ‘Life as a professional Artist’ (Raphael died – of sexual excess – on his thirty-seventh birthday). Of the two decades or so since, at least five full years have contributed little to the number of his paintings. 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.”
Excerpt from: "Nothing Wasted. The Paintings of Richard Harrison" by Brian Sewell
RICHARD HARRISON was born in Liverpool in 1954. He read Medieval History at Cambridge University and then received BA and MA Fine Art degrees in Painting from Chelsea School of Art. There are few artists today whose work reaches into the inner soul stirring our basic emotional instincts whilst evoking responses of amazement and admiration. His abstract landscapes are rich in colour and texture with generous lashings of paint, which ebb and flow on the canvas reflecting turbulence and often violent upheaval. Harrison’s paintings are awesome in scale; their content exaggerated by the vigorous and robust handling of voluminous layers of paint adeptly manipulated to create a dynamic expression of form and colour which resonate all-over the canvas thus underpinning the powerful emotional and visionary themes ever present in the artist’s compositions. He has that unique ability common to any gifted and adventurous painter which is to arouse emotions in the viewer. Be it by portraying agonising convoluted figures in a given situation or narrative or by the representation of natural phenomena usually in turmoil using his preferred combination of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ colours to evoke anger or joy and calmness or tranquillity.
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