Jeffrey Harrison

Artist Statement

"I went to city run art classes for three hours ever Saturday during the school year from the age of seven till about fourteen. I took an evening life drawing class at Ontario College of Art when I was seventeen. There are a few more of these flimsy educational experiences, but that's about it.

I had a few good inspirers in my life, a few of the right lessons about pictures, but if I've got anything to show it's from plodding along, reading books, going to galleries, incessantly drawing, you know. 

I worked in silkscreen shops, photography studios, kitchens, construction, blah blah blah. 

I divide my time between painting and working as a set dresser."

--

Jeffrey Harrison lives and works in Toronto. He has been showing with Dianna Witte Gallery since 2005.

Exhibition Text

All my Buttered Bagels
June 6th - 30th, 2018

Painting has a myriad of rules that it keeps under wraps, laboured on behind the scenes as to not disrupt the illusion of an effortless masterpiece. There are rules of perspective and composition, ratios, and colour theory. The result is familiar paintings that we're used to looking at, that we can easily understand and classify. It can get a little boring after awhile.

Jeff Harrison shuns the notion that paintings should have rules. And his paintings are anything but boring. Instead, he lets the painting do what he feels it has to do, and bends the rules of the medium to somehow make it work. And it does: The result is chaotic, a departure from the safety we've come to know in paintings. Vibrant colours, flowers, and fluid shapes fill the paintings; as if the amorphous figures are begging to be included, squeezed into the canvas. 

Harrison's paintings are objects that we interact with: they make their physicality known through size, texture, and colour. The energy in them is palatable. His most recent work deviates slightly from Harrison's previous series, with the motif of nature and flowers at the forefront (flowers on acid, albeit). Harrison's own relationship to nature and gardening influences this motif, with elements from his life incorporated into the paintings. 

Looking at Harrison's paintings, we realize that there's pleasure in chaos. Our eyes flutter through the work, finding new sections and passageways with each glance. A psychedelic Rorschach Test, we can attribute what we want onto the paintings, and it tells us something about ourselves.