A few days ago I had the chance to talk to the painter Richard C. Harrington about his work in general and about the new work in his show, “The Artifact of Landscape”, which opens this week at the Lockhart Gallery at SUNY Geneseo. I have known Rick for about 20 years, and in addition to sharing many great times with him, I’ve had the pleasure of watching him evolve from a good painter to a great painter. Yeah, I know, “great” is a big word that gets thrown around a bit too freely sometimes, but in this case it is absolutely appropriate.
A painter for the past 31 years, Rick’s work has evolved over time from representational work to something more abstract that, for him, digs deeper into the answer to the question “why paint?” Early on in his career, while supporting himself working as an art director and designer at an ad agency and then later as an illustrator, Rick was spending a lot of time painting. He studied portraiture with Peter Berg of Rochester, NY, and honed his skills making plein air paintings. Rick was influenced early on by the work of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, particularly their brush strokes which combined precision and flourish. Always drawn to the outdoors, he naturally gravitated to painting landscapes.
About 10 years ago, Rick received a grant to paddle the Genesee River from Pennsylvania to Lake Ontario and produce a sketchbook of the trip. It proved to be a pivotal trip for the direction his painting would take. Although the paddling part of the trip was great, the sketchbook brought him to the realization that he didn’t really care about what he was doing. The sketchbook had become “…something destined for a drawer somewhere, not to be seen until my kids settled my estate… so what?” Why paint?
To help him find the answer, Rick turned to two things that always helped clear his head: reading and the outdoors. Reexamining the work of authors Barry Lopez, Richard Nielson and Hugh Brody and spending plenty of time out in nature led him to the belief that ”we hold remnants of landscape in our minds as a way of navigating our world pre-map, compass, and gps.” This prompted an exploration of our primitive connection to the land through a contemporary mindset, in a society increasingly removed from nature.
Some of my favorite work resulting from this exploration is a series of non-representational barn paintings, including this one, ”old woman’s barn”. As Rick says, “the memories of simple forms and shapes in the land orient us, locate us in place.” By blending the influence of Mark Rothko in seeking an emotional response to color and form with the iconic image of a barn, Rick has created a monument to people who do physical work, and an homage to his ancestors who were (and are) ranchers in Oregon and Washington. Even without knowing this, it is impossible to look past this painting and others in the series. They draw you in and keep you there for a while.
Rick’s latest body of work, “The Artifact of Landscape”, continues the exploration. He posits that “When you are out in nature, assuming you are physically comfortable, you are peaceful. Its ability to provide a mechanism for stepping back from the stresses that our society manufactures for us to a place of peace is the value of nature in the modern world, and we need to keep some of it intact” To that end, Rick’s new work seeks to bring nature indoors to reengage those who’ve become disconnected. These large canvases- 4’ x 5’ and larger, sometimes combined as diptychs and triptychs- are somewhat representational from a distance, but up close reveal an abstract impressionistic surface texture (think Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock). They are often combined with a shadow box/ curio cabinet containing found objects, photographs and sketches.
These items along with the scale of the work and the bold, aggressive surface texture are meant to evoke the feeling of being in the place and give a sense of its inhabitants, to feel “not just the wind in your face, but the breeze between your fingers”
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