A Montana cattle breeder. Some watercolors. And an early painting titled “Burning Bush.” A religious reference to the Book of Exodus? Or a veteran rascal having some fun, riffing with words and images, to recall something as out-of-left field as a young boy’s memory of a Thai woman lighting her pubic hair on fire before his eyes?
Those same eyes, now softer with age, still flash baby blue. “OK. Tell me the truth: Have you ever seen this subject matter ever painted by anyone before in the entire history of art?” The breathless trickster smiles; he’s stumped the PhD art historian. “Nope. Never.”
Overturning any doctrine, decorum, belief or convention has been one of Harrison’s favorite places to be for much of his life. Right there where the brambles are crackling. Where something disturbing or radically unfamiliar pushes life into high relief. Where things smart and spark. “I LOVE having people not know if I’m telling the truth or not.” It’s a habit some are hard-pressed to appreciate.
Discomfort
Harrison’s best friend died in 2000, a few months later his wife of 32 years and mother of his three boys died suddenly with leukemia, followed shortly thereafter by the death of his father. Things fell apart. Everything went dark.
We met three years later. He was raw with shock. And in his way, leaning back into life. He wasn’t sure what to think of an eccentric curator, daughter of a minister and a therapist, who took great pains to meet his despondency with determined optimism and who talked with righteous conviction about art and creativity as catalysts for transformative healing. somewhere between his brokenness and skepticism I caught his attention. And he caught mine.
Harrison had tried being an art major in college for a brief time, because it seemed like an easy way to skip classes and go hunting. Many years later, he disappeared into his family’s basement to spend the better part of an entire winter copying beautiful Bhutanese paintings on the the surface of the walls around him to combat depression. Shortly after his wife’s death, a friend had given him a set of paints. After one painting, he’d put them away.
But by 2006, the game was on. I dared him to begin painting again. What did he have to lose? He dared me to enlist as his muse, and without hesitation, settled down into painting as if he’d spent his entire life with brush and palette in hand. He new what he wanted to paint… he’d known for years. One startling image appeared, and then another. Bold and rough, it came pouring out, and I was in awe.
Jumping In
The transition was natural. Painting brought a new kind of freedom. “Color is such a relief. It doesn’t have any association with words. Words take you on to thoughts you’d rather not deal with, on and on. You just start to play with color and finally get a break from the incessant noise in your head. Color is wonderful.”
Harrison’s imagination is formidable, as is his facility for improvisation and storytelling. In writing he is decisively lyrical. but in painting, he is happy to admit he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. He knows nothing about watercolor papers, paints, or brushes, and he likes it that way. His approach is casual, easy, without expectations. He insists that nothing he does in his painting is ever “on purpose.” What he does know, he discovers empirically, through experimentation. Even there, he claims to forget everything from one painting to the next. “It’s always Beginner’s Mind for me.”
He relies almost entirely on intuition, each time feeling his way into creativity as a painter, just as he says he has in hunting, fishing, and most everything else in his life. He’s perfectly comfortable with the mystery of it all, as long as his gut instincts are guiding him. In this space, what just happens can bring tremendous delight. “If I’ve learned anything it’s the wonder of accident! It’s not really what painting is,it’s about what painting does for you.”
Tinkering with colors and shapes provides and antidote to Harrison’s uneasiness in life. “It’s a good way to avoid anxiety as the evening comes.” Beyond this, it’s a bare bones undertaking, with few if any personal requirements. It allows him to empty out the burdens of a thinking mind. A quiet place to rest; nothing else matters. His only light is a fluorescent desk lamp and the glow from his computer. It is not uncommon for a paintbrush to get dipped into a cup of coffee, then back onto a painting. Mindless distraction is the thing. And curiosity. Experimenting with his own airbrush technique to create the feeling of snow one evening, paint splatters onto overdue bills on the desk, onto framed pictures of his boys hanging on the wall, where it remains today, a wink to the the spirit of Jackson Pollock.
One morning I arose to discover what looked like a crime scene. It appeared something had been injured, and was bleeding as it moved through the house. Harrison has taught me to follow a blood trail when we’re hunting in the woods. This was my first opportunity to try my skills here at home. As if in the aspens, I examine and then follow the strange red tracks, moving from the kitchen floor all the way back through the house, over hill and dale, hardwood and carpeting, until they seemed to end, right at Harrison’s desk. I retrace the trail of some tiny creature back again to where I find Harrison relaxing in the kitchen sipping coffee. Leaning down, I examine the bottom of his foot, where, like some kind of forensic Ah Ha! I discover the exact print, a smudge of dragon’s blood red paint on the heel of his left foot, paint he’d inadvertently stepped in before leaving his own bloody trail, after a particularly wild night of frenzied painting.
Another time, he became obsessed with the idea of trying egg tempera. After we talked at length with a member of the Wyeth family about the complexities of the carefully guarded recipe, Harrison decided that process was just too difficult. The next day I discover him cracking eggs, mixing them with vinegar and water in a bowl like some sort of mad scientist. He is intent on covering the surface of all his paintings with this very shiny shellac, made somehow magical in his mind by the inclusion of raw eggs.
Creative Process
Harrison’s process is emphatically self-taught: raw, rough, loose, playful, sometimes sloppy and wild. Organic. Body parts may drop off the edges of an image. A left hand may be attached to a figure’s right arm. Key areas of composition may be entirely ignored until the final moments of a painting’s compltion. In the windstorm of his creative impulse, edges of a painting may become torn or ripped, the artist’s clothing and surroundings covered with color.
Some stories, titles, and imagery come suddenly; many have gestated for years. Once an idea is in place and he begins, he works fast, slapdash; sometimes first creating a light pencil sketch, more often applying paint in ways that seem unplanned and unorganized in any fashion. Each stroke of his brush is fresh, fun, alive with energy.
At times, spontaneity may give way to careful attentiveness, or obsession. Focus on specific elements within a composition often result in luscious layerings of color and line. Watercolors become like oil paints: rich, glistening, luminous. In his best works, landscapes seem to breathe. Even bleed. Portraits convey personality, implying the inner life beyond a subject’s likeness,. At other times, over-working yields a muddy bog that he may abandon and return to later, or in a fit of frustration, completely re-imagine.
Following his instincts takes Harrison to unconventional places. Distraction counters intensity. One of this artist’s favorite ways to paint is to do so while talking on the phone to someone (usually his friend Douglas) so he intentionally “doesn’t take anything to seriously,” and is “Distracted from thinking too hard. My painting is not too much about anything. I just like to push paint around. I like color, I hate evenings, and I’m lazy.”
But he’s been disciplined enough to keep at it. He set a goal for himself six years ago; after completing fifty paintings, he’d know something about how to paint with watercolors. At the time of this writing, he’s completed fifty-six, and averages one new painting each month.
Portraits of Awareness
Since childhood, Harrison has spent the majority of his life in natural surroundings: rivers, woods, tall grass prairies, saltwater flats. Desires as a young hunter and fisherman led him to continuous discoveries about how and why a particular place provides sanctuary for the creatures living there. After years of immersion, his intuitive sensibilities have sharpened into a mature appreciation for the subtle relationships between creatures and their habitats. So much so, that he cannot help but be moved by the feeling of these places, recognizing them as his own sanctuaries.
In sharp contrast to Harrison’s dogged dismissal of any deep significance or meaning, in his paintings one can trace his place of comfort, reprieve, intimate belonging. These images seem to ripple with undercurrents of emotion, private alliterations of wonder, estrangement, secret closeness, grief, comfort, love. Shapes of life that may be odd, surprising, even disturbing, catch our attention and hold it. Something is happening. Something poignant, sobering, urgent. An awareness. Even so, he’ll insist he likes to “have a light touch, keep it simple, and not take anything too seriously.”
“Storytelling is fun!” he declares. “…. and you know how to weave a good one!” I agree with delight. By habit, the poet counters: “I don’t weave stories. They weave me.”
Written by Lynne Spriggs O’Connor