ROBERT PATRICK HARRIS


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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Growing up in South Dakota, I became fascinated with painting in kindergarten. This was in 1958. In 1976, after seeing American Art Since 1945 from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art at the Joslyn Art Museum, art became compelling - showing me a world never before seen. This became my reason for painting: to enable myself and others in seeing and understanding the world. To that end, I paint with precision, fluorescent color, and thematic content. Color provokes attention, precision engages viewing and thematic content encourages thinking. A Bachelor of Science in Fine Art was awarded in 1977 by South Dakota State University, Brookings, South Dakota, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting was conferred in 1981 by the Graduate School University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1985, my painting "Die Laughing" won 1st Place: Painting, in an international exhibit organized by Scarsdale/Metro Art in New York City. Also, in '85 "Hamburger High School" received 1st Award in New American Talent, a nationwide show at Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas. I moved to New Mexico and was awarded best-in-show in statewide exhibits hosted by the College of Santa Fe, 1989 and the Los Alamos, New Mexico Fuller Art Center in 2003. A solo show at the University of Colorado-Boulder was held in 1992 followed by a solo exhibit at the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe in 1994. This exhibit featured eight-foot, sequential paintings targeting social, political, and environmental issues. After two solo exhibits at LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe in 1998 and 2000, a comprehensive survey of 62 paintings were shown at the Washington Pavilion of Art and Science, Sioux Falls, South Dakota 2001. The exhibits of 2000 and 2001 were the direct result of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s award of a $20,000 grant in October 2000. Other awards include: an F.O. Butler Award from South Dakota State University of $2,500 1997; a $4,500 grant from USA Artists Los Angeles 2011; the Bobbye Straight Award - a $3,500 grant from the University of New Mexico Los Alamos 2015 and a Purchase Award from the Sahara Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas 2016 for the painting “Day & Nite”, 7 by 5 feet, oil on canvas. Singular works in collective exhibitions were included at SITE Santa Fe 1996 and the Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln NE 1997. The New Mexico Museum of Art included the painting "Twins" in a 2005 exhibit and works from the ManTrap series were shown at the Santa Fe Art Institute in November of 2011. Recently, my paintings were exhibited in collective exhibitions at Yares Art Projects 2018. In 2019 Chiaroscuro Contemporary Santa Fe hosted a solo exhibition with the largest work similar to a scroll at 20 ft. in length.

ABOUT THE PAINTINGS
Early on in my career the paintings were comic – satiric works on the foibles and occasional absurdities of humanity - quite funny, engaging social issues in a disarming and comical way. Growing older, it seems I am creating a series of memorials and paint them as beautifully as possible. Seeing my series on 5 major hurricanes, a curator remarked: “they’re so pretty.” The content of earlier work addressed effects of pollution and environmental degradation, emphasized by placing multiple canvases in sequential/cinematic order. One painting glows in the dark. Another is a zoetrope of a boy trying to kill a frog. Over 40 years, my stylistic approach to painting has changed from impasted cartoons to expressive realism to "who knows what I should call these"? The content of current work addresses the phenomenon of global warming. To me, paintings are ideas. I take an image and imagine it on a template that resembles the national flag of Greece. Changes are made during its fabrication. The method of painting is precise. With this in mind, here's a sample: I painted a set of clocks of four time zones in the continental United States as a way to paint about the abstract concept of time and devices that keep time. They don’t appear to be clocks - they look like runes, divining a truth without explaining it. Another interesting clock is the Dooms Day Clock invented and re-set annually by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I painted a clock titled Tone in fluorescent red and yellow that does not calibrate a specific time to midnight, which is rather the point when considering an actual doomsday. In a set of 5 paintings, an image of the Cyclone roller coaster on Coney Island is visible. Each painting is named after one of the more severe, recent cyclones/hurricanes in the USA: Katrina, Sandy, Irma, Harvey, and Maria. To me, weather has become a roller coaster of extreme events - less predictable, more severe. In a recent set of 4 paintings titled Snow, an image of Mount Denali is painted. Half the
snow is yellow, half the snow is white. As a child, my friends would say: “Don’t eat yellow snow it’s been pissed on”. Current works extend this theme, painting a television test pattern with instructions to 'Please Stand By'. Upside-down birds, polar bears in the desert or navigating a Frogger game, migraine headaches, deer in dried-up forests and gears that don't mesh - all subjects of work in 2022 & 2023.