Lady Slipper Study Print

John Harne was born in 1956 with the artist spending most of his teenage years in Maine. He has kept studios in Western Maryland, New York City, Atlanta, Georgia and currently in Homosassa, Florida, a rural area on the gulf coast of Florida. Harne never had a significant mentor in art although he briefly met Ralston Crawford as a teen and independently studied watercolor, egg tempera and oil painting and life drawing for several years before launching his art career as a photo-realist painter. The Bienville Gallery in New Orleans gave him his first exhibition at age 19 in 1977. By the early 1980’s he was exhibiting in WDC, Baltimore and New York and his work had shifted to a surreal narrative style focused on mythology and allegory. Attracted to the East Village art scene he moved to NYC in 1984 and exhibited in numerous galleries there. Nearly a decade later he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, renting an artist’s loft at the King Plow Art Center. While he continued to paint and exhibit, his creative efforts were pulled in many directions for over thirty years. Eventually Harne developed his current style and rediscovered his attraction to realism with watercolor and oil painting. When not in his studio, he loves to travel to remote and rural locations in search of inspiration.