Harry Orlyk

#5425 Field Work: Impressionist Landscape Painting of Tractor in Wheat Field

2016

Harry Orlyk is celebrated for his ability to capture rural country landscapes with Impressionistic brushstrokes and bright color palettes. Painting daily, the artist drives throughout upstate New York, stopping to observe and paint en plein air whenever and wherever a landscape strikes him.

Orlyk was born in Troy, New York in 1947. In 1971, after graduating college, he went on to graduate school at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Over the next nine years, he was influenced by several Nebraskan artists.

"Still-life painter Robin Smith taught me how to use paint without turpentine — to paint from the tube," Orlyk has said.

Orlyk also admits the influence of photographer Lawrence McFarland, who taught him what spiritual space was and how to emphasize it. Lastly, he credits well-known Lincoln painter Keith Jacobshagen with having impressed on him the importance of routine.

Orlyk currently resides with his family in Salem, New York, near the Vermont border. For anyone raised in the country, Orlyk’s Impressionist oil paintings spark a sense of memory that is at once shared and deeply personal.

Orlyk's work evokes a return to days spent as a kid, when you played behind Old Hap’s Barn or played hide-and-seek in the cornfield. If raised in the city, his paintings illustrate what you fantasized about living in the country would be like. With each changing day and season, Orlyk reminds us of the simplistic beauty inherent in rural, small-town America.

Find original Harry Orlyk landscape paintings and other art on 1stDibs.

(Biography provided by Carrie Haddad Gallery)