Allen Harrison

April

2018

"Per aspera ad astra" is Latin for "through difficulty to the stars." A friend asked me to read a religious text. The opening chapter talked about "God's enemies." I thought, God has...

"My work principally consists of deeply abstracted figure compositions--intuitive constructions that begin with random marks establishing larger masses of torsos, heads, and limbs in an undefined setting. The emphasis is almost purely on intuition. The figures are born of their surrounding environment, emerging only partially and fugitively from the layers of pigment. A narrative is evident but never overt. A crown, a shield, a boat, a wheel. Though the subject has recently coalesced around my reading of Dante and Shakespeare, the settings remain extremely vague- a beach, an interior, a woodland. The paintings are, in the end, meditations on the relationship between the protagonists in a wordless drama. In my paintings, I use a cold wax medium combined with dry pigments, oil paint, and embedded fragments of burlap. The surfaces eventually build up into a dense, rugged terrain." --Thaddeus Radell

Attempting to capture the skateboarder in motion.

“Coral Gardens” is an interpretation of the experience we had in the Great Lagoon of Rangiroa, a pristine and tranquil spot in the South Pacific. To catch a sense of motion and flick...