Sunrise Painting

These works are modern paintings: built on the work of many artists while rejecting the art of many more. My artistic vision is devoted to improving our understanding of life on earth and our role as stewards of this planet. I can tell you how and why a painting is made but, unable to explain its meaning. That is up to you. Images in some of the paintings are partially obscured by bands of color, producing a louvered visual field - similar to mist effects employed in scrolls by Wang Hui in 1698. Likewise, these bands of color resemble the national flag of Greece - flipped & flopped. The paintings reference commonplace images: video games, carnival, television, headaches, nature, disasters, music, charms, signs & symbols. Many recent works are diptychs. One set of four paintings seemingly depict four time zones in the continental United States. A fifth diptych of clocks is painted in fluorescent color and based on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists doomsday clock - created by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein & Eugene Rabinowitch in 1947. A second set of five works in oil, enamel and fluorescent enamel depict the Cyclone rollercoaster on Coney Island in New York city. These ‘cyclones’ are named after five major hurricanes: Katrina, Harvey, Irma, Sandy, and Maria. Prior to 1998, the work was brightly colored and highly impasted, often using a cinematic arrangement by placing multiple canvases in sequential order - like a zoetrope. After 1998, I shifted the paintings’ material substance from thick to thin. The ‘thin’ works explored preternatural elements in our daily lives and focused on incidents of spiritual and intellectual compression. Originally from Sioux Falls, South Dakota Harris has lived and worked in Santa Fe since 1981. His paintings have been exhibited throughout the United States and are represented in a number of private collections including the Sahara Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas and the Graham Collection, Albuquerque. An environmental and political activist, he has been painting since kindergarten. He was employed as an exhibit specialist in a number of Santa Fe galleries and served for seventeen years as Chair of the Department of Fine Art at the University of New Mexico-Los Alamos. Harris has received several awards: a Pollock Krasner Grant, the Bobbye Straight Faculty Initiative Award, a United States Artists USA Project Grant, and an F.O. Butler Award for Excellence in Education.