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THE PERFECT CANVAS – Chatelaine Article, Aug 2009 – Text and photos by Kim Christie Painter Laura Harris lends a soft touch to her Victoria country haven, a stark contrast to the vivid and passionate artwork she creates in her paint-splattered garden studio. Q. Your painting and decorationg styles are entirely different. Judging by your home, I would expect you to paint in a warm fuzy manner, but your work is striking and passionate. A. People have commented that they thought my home would be more modern and bold like my work, but I've never really thought about them as opposites. Both invite people in and ask them to stay for a while. They each offer a sense of acceptance, of connection and of belonging. If I’m alongside my work, I will often ask you to touch it, feel the texture and the motion in it. Q.Country style is sometimes described as charming, but yours is more country colourful. Or country comfortable. A.I like eclectic country comfortable. Come and stay... drink wine and eat chocolate – spill a little! I want it to be inviting. If you visit my home you will find that everything is touchable as well - nothing is off bounds. It's a family home full of life. Q.If I were going to give this easthetic a name, I would call it peonies in a watering can. A. I love that! I guess I would say that both my decorating and painting style are beautifully imperfect. I've also inherited my Mother and Grandmother's passion for flowers. I always have a vase of fresh cut flowers in the house and peonies are my absolute favourite. Flowers speak of hope, of strength and determination. The watering can in the garden was my Grandmother's and has tremendous meaning. She always kept a garden, and now at the age of 96, she loves to walk through mine and she shines with pride when she does. Q. Soft quilts, worn wood and wicker baskets – everything has a familiar feel to it. What qualities does something need to catch your eye and make it into your home? A. Everything here has its own journey or story. The basket in the window is from a funky second-hand shop in town. It is a Chinese farmer’s basket, originally used to carry produce to market. You can still see the original family symbols on it. Q. I love how all the drapery in your house ties with a big knot at the ends. Where did that idea come from? A. I could come up with something more romantic here, but the simple truth is that I didn't want to hem them! I came up with it out of sheer laziness, and then loved them that way. Q. There’s nothing constructed about your decorating. It feels as though you've brought home a lot of beautiful things that you fell in love with and plopped them wherever there was room. A. My husband and I both love to explore antique furniture shops. There's a wonderful little shop in Victoria called Sweet Peas at Home. It's filled with wonderful old cabinets, tables and treasures. We always make room for the one thing we "can't live without". We've also been given some amazing pieces from parents on both sides. I am fourth generation and was lucky enough to get some beautiful pieces from the original family home here in Victoria. Each piece ties me to my history and has a story of rich tradition. I love that. The rug in my studio was my Great, Great Aunts! It was terribly worn but I loved it, and thought it would be a perfect grounding for me out there. Despite being beneath splatters, I really cherish it. Q. Do you paint with great abandon, or are you just messy? A. I am messy – always have been. And I do paint with great abandon – for me there's no other way. Nothing is safe. Every square inch of my studio has splatters on it: the phone, the rug, the stereo, the ceiling – even the dog. Q. Is that why you created your little painting place in the garden? A. I used to paint in the garage. When my husband found pink spatters on his golf bag, we both knew it was time to build a place where I could be recklessly creative. My Dad, Father-in-law and husband built my small studio for me. It is only eight by twelve feet but it functions perfectly with french doors, heating, ventilation and a great stereo. It's magic. Q. It must be everyone’s dream to put some French doors on a little shack in the backyard and paint for a living – and you actually live it! What advice would you give someone getting started in the business of art? A. Paint. Paint. Paint. Fall in love with your work and others will too. Believe in yourself and the effect your work has on people. Always experiment. Paint. Paint. Paint. Q. Your great attitude is evident throughout your home and in your paintings. What’s your recipe for a happy life? A. Believe. Say thank you. Watch and listen. Create. Love. Celebrate. _________________________________________ Victoria Times Colonist, Sept 20, 2007 PAINTINGS SHED LIGHT ON QUEST FOR RADIANCE - by Robert Amos My interview with Laura Harris took place in the Avenue Gallery where her new show just opened. I asked her two questions: how? and why? “How? I start with a vague idea - the red of someone’s cardigan, an idea of perspective. But that all goes out the window as soon as I go into my studio,” she laughs. She prepares her canvases, four or five at a time, with a layer of wrinkled archival tissue soaked in acrylic medium. “It’s gunged up, and the gooey bits that come off are thrown back on,” she explains. She’s actually making the painting at this early stage of development, and not just creating an underpainting. Larger textural elements are formed with acrylic “moulding mud” which she rubs in by hand. “That’s the fun part,” Harris says. “I will mix a bit of colour in, but really I work with light - the absence of pigment.” This texture shows up in the raking light which falls across the wall on which she hangs her canvas. To keep the air fresh she works with the french doors that open onto the garden in her tiny eight by twelve foot studio. When she’s at work, Harris becomes utterly engrossed in her practice. It’s a fully physical task and she has the music turned up loud. Then she’s in the zone, “and I do disappear,” she admits. “Hours pass.” Her painting practice is not organized. “There’s no palette, no mixes of paint. I take the paint straight out of the tube with the tip of the hardware store brushes I use, and I experiment with the colours right on the canvas.” The smaller brushes were filched from her young daughter’s paint set. As the acrylic paint dries quickly, she seizes those liquid opportunities. “If you don’t catch it,’ she notes, “you miss the light. The fluid nature of the medium is what I work with.” There are layers and layers of acrylic colour. “I love the richness of oil paint,” she explains, “but I’d be waiting forever for it to dry.” And then there is the toxicity of oil paint which, as a mother, she is glad to avoid. To compensate for rather flat quality of acrylic she varnishes her paintings for a glossy finish. Harris’s entire painting activity is in quest of a certain radiance, and her approach is not formulaic. “If you’re not in that place,” Harris reminds me, describing her state of mind, “the paintings don’t have that glow. You have to do what needs to be done without getting in its way. In the end, when I look at it, it feels like I didn’t do it.” A few years ago Harris drew things on her fields of colour, and certain objects still occur, resulting in a narrative idea and a decorative effect which is easy to dismiss. Those tulips, which became a signature of her early work, are like the buffaloes and polar bears that her mentor Jimmy Wright inscribes on his colour fields. But as she proceeded she has found an inherent meaning in her chromatic expanses which seems to make the flowers superfluous. We seem to have arrived at the second question: why? Harris now perceives in her work “a sense of longing, a connection to Something Bigger.” This is as close as she is willing to get to describing the meaning inherent in these abstract paintings. “I know it’s present, and the glow represents it.” What it is remains undefined. Despite the sheer gorgeousness of her colours and the insouciance of her line - dripped, brushed or thrown into place with abandon - larger issues seem to be coming forth from the canvases. “I get sad about a lack of connection in the world in general,” she observes. “I have a sense of a higher power, of a belonging to something bigger. But everybody out there seems to be cruising along with a total disconnect from the things that are real.” It is with genuine surprise that she observes the responses that her paintings elicit. “At the opening people were even crying and shaking, having a real emotional response,” she marvels. “They wanted to have these pieces, to live with them.” Though she may not be able to put it into words, something is going on here. Laura Harris, in her homey way, is creating transcendental paintings in the high romantic tradition. It is simple to draw comparisons with the late work of J. M. W. Turner and with Emily Carr’s most evanescent forest interiors. Inevitably, she’s channelling her own vision. It’s a pleasure to watch it come into sight. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– FOCUS Magazine, Sept 2007 LAURA HARRIS: PAINTING IN ELEGANT CHAOS written by Linda Rogers, photos by Vйronique da Silva Photography Her colonial house, surrounded by happy flowerbeds, is white and symmetrical. Her studio in the garden is white and symmetrical. Laura Harris would appear to have a perfectly well-balanced life, house, garden, an adorable five-year old daughter, a moderately obedient dog, and a handsome husband. A closer look at her studio, a one-roomed outbuilding with French doors that open to southern light, reveals the anarchy that lives beneath the surface. On the floor, her grandmother’s carpet looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. The white walls are spattered with acrylic paint. Laura admits to a wild side. “A friend says I live in elegant chaos.” She paints to music and dances so energetically that some of her body parts are wearing out. I suggest that my Chinese medical practitioner might be able to fix her underpainting. The artist explains that her canvases are not worked up from a painted ground but from archival tissue and molding paste. “First I work on the texture of my ideas and then I add the colour in layers.” We examine various works in progress, noting the development of shape into tinted surfaces. Mostly abstract expressionist in style, she also has her signature flowers. “I love tulips. They have all the strength and vulnerability of women.” It is a beautiful day, and at the moment, Laura’s garden is bursting with daisies and day lilies. I think I recall splashes of montbretia. She offers tea and I accept. There is a plate of cookies laid out, with macaroons and two pieces of shortbread. There were six pieces, she ruefully admits, but Norris, the moderately obedient dog, ate the rest. Norris wags his tail in self-approval. We decide to leave the cookies for Laura’s daughter Madeleine. She proudly shows me Madeleine’s vivid paintings hanging on a sitting room wall; we agree that the ultimate desideratum for any artist is the child’s view. Two classical obstacles women artists have faced are balancing motherhood with an artistic vocation and scaling their work to fit their strength and available resources and workspace. Laura’s studio, an eight by twelve conforming outbuilding, does not allow her to work on monumental canvases, which she says might be a good thing in view of her shoulder problems. Her paintings conform to the scale of her life, as does the time she spends working. “I have a good support system of family and friends. My daughter deserves to have as much of me as she needs and my schedule of painting no more than four hours a day has worked very well for us.” “The first year of Madeleine’s life, my paintings reflected a mother’s fatigue. People who had become used to viewing my work as an energy source expressed disappointment. Now I hope they can see that Madeleine has enriched and deepened my approach to life and art.” Harris’ is a positive oeuvre, but there are contrasts in texture and hue that suggest the opposition of forces. Her relationship with light has been compared to that of Turner. “I hadn’t seen any of his paintings and, when I did go to London, I was pleased by the comparison.” She is just becoming acquainted with painters she admires, people like Klimt and van Gogh, “…in the flesh. So much better.” Harris is not an academic painter. Her formative influences were her father, a mechanical engineer, and the beautiful beach landscapes around Sidney where she grew up. The beaches won. She rebelled against her father’s more linear approach to drawing and painting and began the relationship with water and sky that characterizes her work. After graduating from Parklands School, which she describes as a “performing arts school” in the ’80s, she studied graphic design at Camosun College and opened her own business, Laura Burrows Creative Inc. Unaware of influences and schools of painting, she took some time to follow her heart. Believing she needed the bread-and-butter security of her business, she inched toward her career as a painter. Supported by fellow painters at Paton Place on Herald Street, she was pleasantly surprised when she discovered she could make a living as an artist. Now Laura is represented by galleries in Whistler, White Rock, Victoria, Sidney, Toronto, and will soon have galleries in New York and Palm Desert. Laura says she is “incredibly thankful and proud of being a self-sufficient woman artist.” She has found her niche and filled it gracefully. When she looks back on this wonderful ride through life, what would she like to have accomplished? “I would say that it gives me great satisfaction to share my energy with people who need it. One woman visited a painting of mine before each of her chemotherapy sessions. She said it gave her the strength to carry on. When my paintings help to bring people together in understanding or to heal them in some way , I feel blessed.” Laura Harris’ new show “Elegant Chaos” will be on display at the Avenue Gallery (2184 Oak Bay Avenue) from Sunday, September 16 until September 29. The artist will be discussing her work at 1 pm on September 16, during a wine and cheese reception. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Magazin'Art, Fall 2006 CREATING A LANDSCAPE OF CALM by Ingrid C. King According to the Dalai Lama, get to learn the rules so you’ll know how to break them properly. This seems to be Laura Harris’ artistic philosophy in a nutshell. The Victoria artist learned drawing techniques from her father, took a Visual Arts program at Camosun College and studied under local renowned artist, Jimmy Wright who encouraged freedom of expression. Today Harris buys her brushes from a hardware store, has canvases made to her preferred size and liking and when she’s ready to paint, forgets all the lessons she’s ever learned. “I attack the canvas,” she laughs. “I’m not a delicate painter.” In fact, she says her floor to ceiling paint-splattered 8 x 10 studio is a complete disaster. Before becoming a “serious” painter, Harris worked as a graphic designer for six years, doing corporate identity work for her clients. After seeing some of Jimmy Wright’s work, she knew she had to get back into painting. “Most of my paintings are a mix of life’s chaos and calm. I spend a lot of time at the beach near my home and you can see it in my work.” One art critic described Harris’ work as ‘beautifully imperfect.’ It’s a compliment she feels closely represents her style. “What I strive for is to trust in my mistakes, which ultimately become my best work.” Her mixed media style is distinctive with its warm, rich colour palette and multi-dimensional layers that emit a range of moods in each person who views them. Her series have focused on flowers, specifically the female sensuality of tulips, white houses against a cross-section horizon of primary colours and her latest work, muted abstract landscapes with strings of paint drops that symbolize various elements, from journeys to relationships. Sometimes words find their way into her art, from a note to her husband, musings in her journal to a crossword puzzle. The slips of paper are painted in and add an esoteric dimension to the painting. “The notes aren’t meant for reading; they transcend the painting,” says Harris. “I am an energy believer and feel that words can be such a huge part of the art.” A tactile artist in every way, Harris uses her hands as tools, squirting the paint directly onto her fingers. When she begins a new piece, she takes a thick layer of medium, acid-free tissue paper and applies it to the canvas. Then she’ll cover it with jet black or leave it as a white sheet before applying more medium and layer it with paint. She achieves the thickness and 3D dimension to her work using sculpting gel that she also squirts into her hand. “You’ll often see my handprints in forms,” she says. While she feels uninhibited while she works, Harris says there is one voice she must ignore. “When I first started painting years ago, it was purely for pleasure,” she says. Now that her work is for public consumption, she noticed a shift in her thought process. “I wonder about the almighty sale and think about creating something I feel people will like and will sell. I have to fight that voice all the time. I’ve talked to other artists and hear the same thing.” Luckily, the galleries Harris deals with are very supportive. “Different galleries have different preferences, but I work with a great group who are really open about my work.” Currently, painting abstracts bring Harris the most joy. “An abstract offers a sense of escape. I’m very aware of the lost connection between people and a higher power or spiritual connection,” she explains. “In my paintings, I use splatters of paint to represent people.” She appreciates the many different things that people see in her art. “That’s why I love doing shows. I talk to all the people and find out their insights and get to find out what they see in the art.” Today her art is inspired by the landscapes just steps from her door. While her husband Jordie plays along the beach with daughter Madelaine, Harris becomes an observer, of their movement, the mood, their relationship and surroundings. Her landscapes are explosions of colours of the earth and sky, like sandy ocher, sky blue, and sunset burgundy. When she stands before a blank canvas, Harris admits to feeling like a sort of conduit. “The process is not that thought out,” she says. “It’s magical, one that evolves through me. Often it will take over and I feel pushed aside. The thing I love is that what emerges is not what I had in mind. Just that it was meant to be here for some reason,” she muses. “I’ll work on a piece until it breathes on its own. That’s when I know it’s done.” As she approaches her September birthday, Harris is filled with anticipation. “Fall feels like the beginning of the year for me. After my quiet summer months, I can feel the energy of the studio lights beckoning.” This November, Laura Harris will showcase 25 or her latest pieces at the Avenue Gallery in Victoria, B.C. where visitors will see and feel what they want from each piece, exactly as Harris hopes they will. ©2006 Magazin'Art __________________________________