From the artist, in her own words:
Lately I have been pushing more and more into abstracting the forms of nature I love and study. Recognizable forms are now much more often being replaced with passages of paint and colour and texture that allow for a space into which the viewer can enter with their own feelings and memories to shape their experience of the painting in the manner of their own encounters with a known landscape or their memory of being in nature.
I am letting go, inviting a certain unravelling to occur, not imposing myself on the work but letting the material and my engagement with it create something unknown. I am looking for ambiguity and the mystery of things, not satisfied with the outward appearance alone.
We are in a time of instability. Some want to rest in the comfort of the familiar yet I choose to resist this and to live in the tension by responding to the world around me with a new found willingness to discover something new in apparent chaos.
I think in difficult times nature is solace for many of us. In the new freer style of paintings I am bringing the essence of my feelings for being in a garden, near a stream , forest or place of water. I’m trying to create an opportunity for you the viewer to enter that space of peace or quietetude or solace you too may find when encountering the rawness and vitality of the earth we are part of.
About the Artist:
Gabryel Harrison was born in New Zealand. The artist now lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. She completed a BA with a concentration in fine art at the University of Ottawa in 1980, later fulfilling post-graduate requirements to become an art therapist in 1992. Working as an art therapist until 1996, and thereafter in the creative arts field, Harrison has been painting full time since 1999.
Early years spent in the rigorous pursuit and attainment of world-class athletic achievement gave Harrison the necessary discipline to enter long hours of solitude in the studio. These solitary hours facilitate growth, discovery and continual evolution as she seeks to deepen her practice of painting.
Harrison works predominately in the medium of oil painting, but her body of work includes printmaking, texts, video and sculptural objects. Gabryel is a painter inspired by the natural world and in particular its botanical forms. In her hands, the temporality of our existence is revealed in the gestural abstractions of florals, foliage and landforms. Her large scale oils on canvas speak in washes, layers and heavily impastoed passages of our own brief transit through this mysterious universe. As a visual artist who also writes poetry, this art form and Harrison’s favourite poets are also a major source of inspiration for her work.
