gabryel harrison | the arc of our disappearance

gabryel harrison The Arc of Our Disappearance

cover image: blood of flowers, 43 x 43”, oil on canvas, 2016Artwork images courtesy of Winsor Gallery and Gsbryel Harrison

gabryel harrisonThe Arc of Our Dissapearance

Published in conjunction with the exhibtion

Gabryel HarrisonThe Arc of Our Dissapearance

Winsor GalleryMay 28th – June 25th, 2016

winsor gallery258 East 1st Avenue

Vancouver, BC V5T 1A6–

info@winsorgallery.comwinsorgallery.com

Rosebud, Piercing the Dark, 36 x 54”, oil ov canvas, 2016

“Every flower has its own cosmology, its own relationship to the foliage, to the air around it”.-Jane Freilicher

And every flower is perishable. Each one of our lives but a brief flowering. All that we are and all that we love, part of a great current. a beautiful passing stream of ever vanishing stabilities. These paintings look at our passing. I consider the full life cycle of the flower as a reflection ofour own temporality. We are born, we bloom we fade, we die and disappear from this world.

My paintings are reflections on the arc of this natural and beautiful passage. Using oil sticks, paint and beeswax, scratches, scumbles and slung paint, I am inspired by intuition as much as intellect. I celebrate accident, inviting drips and smudges to evoke both decay and effulgence. I encourage a feeling of the sensual and visceral with painterly abstraction, balancing loose gestural brushstrokes with more realistic passages in painting form and void, flower and ground. Like the Japanese phrase “mono no aware”, meaning “beauty tinged with sadness”, I paint the flower and the death in the flower. I offer these paintings in the midst of a world comprised of ever increasing speed and volatility, as possibilities of quiet reflection on what it means to be alive and mortal.

Meditating on the ordinary subject of flowers, I can say as John Cage said of the flower paintings of Morris Graves, “…To the self-destructive inventions of civilization they are the replies of nature”.

Gabryel HarrisonThe Arc of Our Dissapearance

Replies of Nature43 x 43”

Oil on canvas2016

Wind Sleeping in Mouths, 43 x 43”, oil on canvas, 2016

Cherish30 x 40”oil on canvas2016

“On the surface, Harrison’s paintings appear to be about what

practitioners of Zen Buddhism may call ‘everyday suchness’ –

the notion of perceiving an object only as it is, such as

experiencing “a leaf purely as a leaf purely over a period of

time” . The rose sheds its signifying layers, its syrupy cliché,

and becomes only that: a rose. However, the latent themes in

Harrison’s florals and landscapes, which seem darker and more

evanescent than they have ever been, reach beyond the

meditative ‘suchness’ of still life and into the phenomenological

realm through gesture, colour, and poetry. […]

Into Great Stillness, 36 x 67”, oil on canvas, 2016

Ovid’s Garden, 43 x 43”, Oil on canvas, 2016

Forever Unfolding, 36 x 36”, oil on canvas, 2016

Forever Unfolding, 36 x 36”, oil on canvas, 2016

Song of Orpheus, 50 x 60” oil on canvas, 2016

For You, I Bought Peonies28 x 28”

Oil on canvas2016

The beauty in Harrison’s paintings is marred – but not

diminished – by crude drips and slashes that move her

oeuvre out of the realm of representation and into that

of experience. This sensation is owed as much to her use

of colour as it does to her energetic stroke. […] Swathes

of soft pinks and lavenders, golds and creams, remind us

that colour “is not something daubed onto a pre-existing

shape, filling a form”: it has its own, phenomenologi-

cal form that we experience both a retinal and bodily

manner. “ (Excerpt from Heart Wide Open by Alex MF

Quicho.)

Passing Perfume, 50 x 60”, oil on canvas, 2016

Gabryel Harrison currently lives and works in Vancou-

ver, B.C. Her work can be found in private collections

across Canada, the US and abroad.

Fragrant Room, 36 x 36”, oil on canvas, 2016

Your One Beautiful Life, 26.75 x 53”, oil on canvas, 2016