About Works
(texts written by Lizzie Pink)
Notes Towards a Self Portrait
At the age of seventy, Alfred Harris embarked on a rigorous, open-ended series of self-portraits which he has titled – Notes towards a Self portrait – indicating the indeterminacy of each attempt to discover, capture or fix a true likeness or image of self. To reflect his belief that no painting can adequately portray the complexity and multiplicity of an individual’s personality and life-spirit, he has commented, ‘A single portrait provides only a limited concept of the subject and even a perceptive portrait conceals more than it reveals.’ Harris contests the National Portrait Gallery’s published statement that ‘visitors can come face to face with the people that shaped British history’. He feels this is very misleading as ' it overlooks the artist: his or her perception as well as intention.' Many of these portraits of historical figures were commissioned and designed to reflect established social norms and ideals about appearance and social status. By contrast, Alfred Harris approaches portraiture as a quest that seeks out more private, unspoken psychological and emotional states of being and collectively, they demonstrate the limitations of a single image.
The fluctuating emotional drives and energies that body forth an individual’s personality are mercurial and elusive. However, over time, these intangible flows, have the power to erode, shape and etch the very contours and lines of a human face. Alfred Harris’s Notes Towards a Self Portrait, capture the way the invisible forces and dynamics of experience and emotion become embodied over time in the flesh and and bony structure of a human head . The loose gestural brushwork and multiple contours of his portraits testify to the way appearance and human subjectivity are forever in flux. This commitment to use painting as a means to confront and grapple with an ever-changing human presence has a significant tradition in the history of art from Rembrandt to Cezanne and Giacommetti through to later artists such as Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach (who has known Harris for many years).
Since the Romantic era, self-portraiture has been revered as one of the most concentrated forms of expressive painting and most revealing aspects of an artist’s oeuvre – a true marker of honesty and creative insight. Artists such as Van Gogh, Egon Shiele, Picasso, Francis Bacon and Freud all returned to self-portraiture at regular or pivotal moments of their careers. However, it is the self-portrait in old age such as the late self-portraits by Rembrandt or Pierre Bonnard’s unflinching and searing self-images that are celebrated for their profound humanity and courage to bear witness to mortality.
The works in the series, Notes Towards a Self Portrait by Alfred Harris, are still more radical and push the genre of self-portraiture into new territory, both metaphysically and phenomenologically. Although expressive in form, they are clearly very contemporary as a tough conceptual art project. Notes Towards a Self-Portrait constitute a singular path; they are the totality of this artists’ life practice until there is no more work. All of Alfred Harris’s evolving perceptions, emotions and bodily responses pour into these works. There is nothing else.
Seeing a number of Harris paintings together in a series reveals further intangible qualities of a human being through time. Each un-stretched canvas shares a consistency of size and format. All the paintings and drawings represent the artist – filling the space: bust-length, frontal and very close up. The faces unfold like contours of a landscape. The more recent works are increasingly insubstantial, the lines of the face unravelling in delicate lines which hover over pale misty grounds while some faces are half-erased , dissolving, almost wiped out. Encountering Alfred Harris through the numerous oils and drawings pinned up in the studio is like watching film speeded up. The erosion of time becomes visible at a glance; a history of emotions and memory becomes palpable. There is nothing bleak or despairing about this series. The works individually or together impart one of the most important spiritual truths or secrets of life. They are tender about what is most human in us. Notes Towards A Self Portrait embody a momentum; a quest to see and to keep pace with the constantly evolving formations of self. Only through an acceptance of transience can this understanding take shape. The self-portraits are a means to return death’s gaze –a subject that is often treated as a taboo in our culture. Surrounded by Harris’s faces from times past and present, it brings to mind the tenacity and life force celebrated by Dylan Thomas in his poem, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.
‘Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The Earlier Series of Work : Landscapes, Collages, Doves and Kites.
A cursory glance at Harris’s work that pre-dates the series, Notes Towards A Self Portrait, could lead one to believe that the collages, landscapes Dove and Kite paintings are all very different from each other and have no relation to the self-portrait series which was his sole practice for many years. Their sometimes playful, most often poetic themes and more meticulous and delicately wrought processes contrast significantly in tone and approach but all the phases of his work form part of the same restless, spiritual quest. Whether his gaze was directed towards nature in the landscapes and Kites or directed inwards through the self-portraits, Alfred Harris has always sought ways to find material forms for the most transient rhythms of life and the most elusive metaphysical questions.
Landscapes
Harris’s first work as a mature artist were landscape based. He felt an affinity towards the intimate and earthy landscapes of seventeenth century Dutch painters such as Meindart Hobbema and the joyous materiality of John Constable’s work. He was drawn to the mysterious infusion of tactile reality with a vital spirituality in their paintings of nature. These earlier Realist landscape painters discovered ways to make paint perform as an equivalent for leaves, pebbles, ploughed earth or wind-blown clouds and rain-soaked fields but they also used colour and gestural brush work more abstractly as conduits to convey an emotion and mood in nature. Harris’ early expressive landscapes are evocative of the German Expressionist Emile Nolde’s lowering seascapes or the Anglo-Jewish artist, David Bomberg’s near abstract, expressive and muscular landscapes of the 1940s. They are also in tune with the heavily enfleshed painterly landscapes and urban city-scapes of his contemporaries Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Harris’s early landscapes were often based on views he selected on walks within reach of his home in London. Interestingly, they avoid all reference to human habitation and signal a more romantic and sublime trope of nature as an unbounded place of longing. This type of spiritual yearning was to find an outcome in his later series of Kite sky-scapes.
During the 1980s, Harris shifted into a more abstracted and detached process of producing landscape images which were generated through his increasingly sophisticated use of collage. The delicately nuanced colours and carefully constructed zones of space and landscape formation have a resemblance to some of Ben Nicholson’s abstract reliefs of the inter-war period. Harris does not remember any particular response to Nicholson in the Eighties but speaks more of his close scrutiny of Paul Klee. Klee produced such an extraordinary syntax of abstract signs and marks which could act as substitutes for the usual clichés of landscape painting and at the same time he was able to translate powerful emotional feelings through colour and abstract forms. The delicacy and tenderness of Klee’s work; particularly the tremulous sensitivity of his line is something Harris absorbed deeply and it resonates throughout his work.
Collages
Collage is a process which has been shaped by the subversive spirit of deconstruction and bricolage in the synthetic Cubist work of Picasso or the biting political satires constructed by Berlin based Dada artist Raoul Hausmann. Collage has also had more poetic inflections in the delicate nostalgic samplings of detritus by Kurt Schwitters or uncanny Surrealist collisions generated through early collage works of Max Ernst. Collage has always offered a means to speak directly about modernity by literally recycling the popular cultural material that flows around us but it has also been used as a means to wrench art free from the grip of particular conventions and language systems. By tearing cultural material from different contexts, the artist is free from the pressure to find a unique expressive voice. In this sense Collage is a liberating form of playful visual ventriloquism.
Alfred Harris’s collages from the 1970s are beautifully and elegantly crafted. They are more like exquisite marquetry than anarchic Dada work with its de-skilling, DIY aesthetic. Even when Harris used playing cards as the main frame for collage work during the 1970s, the process of making had a meditative perfectionism and craftsmanship that belies the inevitable associations of playing cards with themes of chance or fate. In 1979, the writer Pierre Rouve, wrote on Harris’s work in the catalogue of his retrospective exhibition at the Arts Centre, Institute of Education London. He remarked that a ‘heightened metonymic effect is the unseen thread running along the ample span of Alfred Harris’s work’. Collage was process which produced this metonymic fluency in his practice. As Rouve pointed out, ‘Interwoven or set apart, visual utterances support and enhance each other. And in so doing, they transmute their respective meanings: the Same becomes Different’. The precision and tessellation of abstract forms which starts in his Collages is something that persists and features in painted form in his later Doves and Kite series.
The Journey of the Dove
Harris began this series of paintings in 1975 after first including a bird in a print in 1970. His close friend and artistic collaborator, Jacob Bornfriend, pushed the reading of this by suggesting the bird may be a dove. Something of the spiritual quest informing all of Harris’s practice can be sensed at this point when he conceived a series of works based on the theme of the searching bird from the Ark.
The Dove paintings bring together a number of different aspects and phases of Harris’s practice. Their more abstracted and tessellated constructions embody an aesthetic formed in his collage work. They also push his landscape painting into more stylised and geometric pattern making. Many of the Dove paintings use a compositional grid structure to suggest the bird is seen flying across a landscape through a window. The vivid colours and flat decorative surfaces also suggest these eponymous painted windows have a more spiritual origin as stained glass.
The journey or quest provides the momentum for all of Harris’s work. The titles of his Dove paintings chart a speculative flight for this biblical bird which is an embodiment of hope and salvation. Each painting in the series looks out on a moment of the Dove’s journey: inland from ‘The Cliff, over the high hills of a sun-baked ‘Red Landscape’, past more nurtured ‘Classical Gardens’ to a point, celebrated in several works, which represents the Dove ‘Poised for Landing’.
What is remarkable about the series is that they use a deeply-rooted and even over-familiar metaphor and speak a language of sweetness and beauty but yet still manage to hover above cliché and sentimentality. The use of abstraction to re-present biblical and spiritual subjects is akin to Wassily Kandinsky’s early abstract compositions which are also suggestive of stained glass and use apparently spontaneous abstract marks and spills of colour to veil and transform complex apocalyptic scenes of the The Last Judgement. The tender tone and lyrical colour of these Dove paintings is also in tune with the decorative colours and fairy-tale narratives which vehicles for conveying mystical symbolism and spiritual optimism in the work of Jewish Modernist, Marc Chagall.
"Kite Flying" series
At the moment, Alfred Harris’s studio is like an installation space for works which search soulfully in two directions simultaneously. There are the current oils and drawings which represent his most penetrating gaze, directed inwards through the intense expressions of the self portrait studies. These close-up portraits are currently hung together in the studio like a teeming crowd looking down from one large wall. But there are also a number of earlier Kite sky-scapes, hung here and there, around the studio or stored, leaned up behind easels and studio furniture. These Kite paintings produced in the 1980s, open up the whole studio space heaven-ward. The Kite paintings appear to be almost abstract at first sight and offer no visual foothold for the viewer but they carry a powerful phenomenological impact which can take you off guard and tear the gaze upwards in a dizzying ascent. Following the trail of the kites through clouds and misty atmospheres produces an intense physical experience – drawing maybe on some uncanny memories of being weightless and disembodied. The kites spiral up and beyond, soaring away from and over the earth.
These pictorial kites are not illusionistic depictions but abstract, fluttering shapes made by in-filling delicate colours between the patterns formed by their fragile strings or leashes. The leashes create a web of linear skeins which are precisely incised into rather than drawn across the picture surface. The fragile leashes lovingly entwine or twist, entrap and tangle themselves across unbounded skies. Here and there fields of colour suggest glimpses down to the earth as though seen from outer space. Each Kite painting is dominated by a different palette of blues and greys which creates shifting atmospheric effects or signals changing seasons and times of day. The series unfolds as another epic journey through time and space.
Looking through these earlier series of works, the ambition of Harris’s creative and spiritual journey can be sensed or partially glimpsed. Just as the Dove paintings charted a spiritual journey, so the Kite paintings can be understood to pre-figure his current project, Notes Towards a Self Portrait, which constitute a metaphysical odyssey of self-searching In the context of the current installation or hang of work in Harris’s studio, a mysterious formal relation can be experienced between the Kite sky-scapes and expressive self-portrait studies. Trembling outlines which trace and configure the marks of age and time on Harris’s face also echo the fragile threads of the kites leashes which criss-cross the uncharted skies of the earlier paintings.
Like the series Journey of the Dove, the Kites paintings could flirt dangerously with a romantic tradition of sublime or even more nostalgic cultural tropes of kites as metaphors of the transience of childhood, human hope etc. But once again, Alfred Harris’s purely visual expressions translate these metaphors into fresh and mysterious paintings which open up the symbolism to profound areas of spiritual and metaphysical experience in ways that cannot be put into words.
The fluctuating emotional drives and energies that body forth an individual’s personality are mercurial and elusive. However, over time, these intangible flows, have the power to erode, shape and etch the very contours and lines of a human face. Alfred Harris’s Notes Towards a Self Portrait, capture the way the invisible forces and dynamics of experience and emotion become embodied over time in the flesh and and bony structure of a human head . The loose gestural brushwork and multiple contours of his portraits testify to the way appearance and human subjectivity are forever in flux. This commitment to use painting as a means to confront and grapple with an ever-changing human presence has a significant tradition in the history of art from Rembrandt to Cezanne and Giacommetti through to later artists such as Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach (who has known Harris for many years).
Since the Romantic era, self-portraiture has been revered as one of the most concentrated forms of expressive painting and most revealing aspects of an artist’s oeuvre – a true marker of honesty and creative insight. Artists such as Van Gogh, Egon Shiele, Picasso, Francis Bacon and Freud all returned to self-portraiture at regular or pivotal moments of their careers. However, it is the self-portrait in old age such as the late self-portraits by Rembrandt or Pierre Bonnard’s unflinching and searing self-images that are celebrated for their profound humanity and courage to bear witness to mortality.
The works in the series, Notes Towards a Self Portrait by Alfred Harris, are still more radical and push the genre of self-portraiture into new territory, both metaphysically and phenomenologically. Although expressive in form, they are clearly very contemporary as a tough conceptual art project. Notes Towards a Self-Portrait constitute a singular path; they are the totality of this artists’ life practice until there is no more work. All of Alfred Harris’s evolving perceptions, emotions and bodily responses pour into these works. There is nothing else.
Seeing a number of Harris paintings together in a series reveals further intangible qualities of a human being through time. Each un-stretched canvas shares a consistency of size and format. All the paintings and drawings represent the artist – filling the space: bust-length, frontal and very close up. The faces unfold like contours of a landscape. The more recent works are increasingly insubstantial, the lines of the face unravelling in delicate lines which hover over pale misty grounds while some faces are half-erased , dissolving, almost wiped out. Encountering Alfred Harris through the numerous oils and drawings pinned up in the studio is like watching film speeded up. The erosion of time becomes visible at a glance; a history of emotions and memory becomes palpable. There is nothing bleak or despairing about this series. The works individually or together impart one of the most important spiritual truths or secrets of life. They are tender about what is most human in us. Notes Towards A Self Portrait embody a momentum; a quest to see and to keep pace with the constantly evolving formations of self. Only through an acceptance of transience can this understanding take shape. The self-portraits are a means to return death’s gaze –a subject that is often treated as a taboo in our culture. Surrounded by Harris’s faces from times past and present, it brings to mind the tenacity and life force celebrated by Dylan Thomas in his poem, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.
‘Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The Earlier Series of Work : Landscapes, Collages, Doves and Kites.
A cursory glance at Harris’s work that pre-dates the series, Notes Towards A Self Portrait, could lead one to believe that the collages, landscapes Dove and Kite paintings are all very different from each other and have no relation to the self-portrait series which was his sole practice for many years. Their sometimes playful, most often poetic themes and more meticulous and delicately wrought processes contrast significantly in tone and approach but all the phases of his work form part of the same restless, spiritual quest. Whether his gaze was directed towards nature in the landscapes and Kites or directed inwards through the self-portraits, Alfred Harris has always sought ways to find material forms for the most transient rhythms of life and the most elusive metaphysical questions.
Landscapes
Harris’s first work as a mature artist were landscape based. He felt an affinity towards the intimate and earthy landscapes of seventeenth century Dutch painters such as Meindart Hobbema and the joyous materiality of John Constable’s work. He was drawn to the mysterious infusion of tactile reality with a vital spirituality in their paintings of nature. These earlier Realist landscape painters discovered ways to make paint perform as an equivalent for leaves, pebbles, ploughed earth or wind-blown clouds and rain-soaked fields but they also used colour and gestural brush work more abstractly as conduits to convey an emotion and mood in nature. Harris’ early expressive landscapes are evocative of the German Expressionist Emile Nolde’s lowering seascapes or the Anglo-Jewish artist, David Bomberg’s near abstract, expressive and muscular landscapes of the 1940s. They are also in tune with the heavily enfleshed painterly landscapes and urban city-scapes of his contemporaries Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Harris’s early landscapes were often based on views he selected on walks within reach of his home in London. Interestingly, they avoid all reference to human habitation and signal a more romantic and sublime trope of nature as an unbounded place of longing. This type of spiritual yearning was to find an outcome in his later series of Kite sky-scapes.
During the 1980s, Harris shifted into a more abstracted and detached process of producing landscape images which were generated through his increasingly sophisticated use of collage. The delicately nuanced colours and carefully constructed zones of space and landscape formation have a resemblance to some of Ben Nicholson’s abstract reliefs of the inter-war period. Harris does not remember any particular response to Nicholson in the Eighties but speaks more of his close scrutiny of Paul Klee. Klee produced such an extraordinary syntax of abstract signs and marks which could act as substitutes for the usual clichés of landscape painting and at the same time he was able to translate powerful emotional feelings through colour and abstract forms. The delicacy and tenderness of Klee’s work; particularly the tremulous sensitivity of his line is something Harris absorbed deeply and it resonates throughout his work.
Collages
Collage is a process which has been shaped by the subversive spirit of deconstruction and bricolage in the synthetic Cubist work of Picasso or the biting political satires constructed by Berlin based Dada artist Raoul Hausmann. Collage has also had more poetic inflections in the delicate nostalgic samplings of detritus by Kurt Schwitters or uncanny Surrealist collisions generated through early collage works of Max Ernst. Collage has always offered a means to speak directly about modernity by literally recycling the popular cultural material that flows around us but it has also been used as a means to wrench art free from the grip of particular conventions and language systems. By tearing cultural material from different contexts, the artist is free from the pressure to find a unique expressive voice. In this sense Collage is a liberating form of playful visual ventriloquism.
Alfred Harris’s collages from the 1970s are beautifully and elegantly crafted. They are more like exquisite marquetry than anarchic Dada work with its de-skilling, DIY aesthetic. Even when Harris used playing cards as the main frame for collage work during the 1970s, the process of making had a meditative perfectionism and craftsmanship that belies the inevitable associations of playing cards with themes of chance or fate. In 1979, the writer Pierre Rouve, wrote on Harris’s work in the catalogue of his retrospective exhibition at the Arts Centre, Institute of Education London. He remarked that a ‘heightened metonymic effect is the unseen thread running along the ample span of Alfred Harris’s work’. Collage was process which produced this metonymic fluency in his practice. As Rouve pointed out, ‘Interwoven or set apart, visual utterances support and enhance each other. And in so doing, they transmute their respective meanings: the Same becomes Different’. The precision and tessellation of abstract forms which starts in his Collages is something that persists and features in painted form in his later Doves and Kite series.
The Journey of the Dove
Harris began this series of paintings in 1975 after first including a bird in a print in 1970. His close friend and artistic collaborator, Jacob Bornfriend, pushed the reading of this by suggesting the bird may be a dove. Something of the spiritual quest informing all of Harris’s practice can be sensed at this point when he conceived a series of works based on the theme of the searching bird from the Ark.
The Dove paintings bring together a number of different aspects and phases of Harris’s practice. Their more abstracted and tessellated constructions embody an aesthetic formed in his collage work. They also push his landscape painting into more stylised and geometric pattern making. Many of the Dove paintings use a compositional grid structure to suggest the bird is seen flying across a landscape through a window. The vivid colours and flat decorative surfaces also suggest these eponymous painted windows have a more spiritual origin as stained glass.
The journey or quest provides the momentum for all of Harris’s work. The titles of his Dove paintings chart a speculative flight for this biblical bird which is an embodiment of hope and salvation. Each painting in the series looks out on a moment of the Dove’s journey: inland from ‘The Cliff, over the high hills of a sun-baked ‘Red Landscape’, past more nurtured ‘Classical Gardens’ to a point, celebrated in several works, which represents the Dove ‘Poised for Landing’.
What is remarkable about the series is that they use a deeply-rooted and even over-familiar metaphor and speak a language of sweetness and beauty but yet still manage to hover above cliché and sentimentality. The use of abstraction to re-present biblical and spiritual subjects is akin to Wassily Kandinsky’s early abstract compositions which are also suggestive of stained glass and use apparently spontaneous abstract marks and spills of colour to veil and transform complex apocalyptic scenes of the The Last Judgement. The tender tone and lyrical colour of these Dove paintings is also in tune with the decorative colours and fairy-tale narratives which vehicles for conveying mystical symbolism and spiritual optimism in the work of Jewish Modernist, Marc Chagall.
"Kite Flying" series
At the moment, Alfred Harris’s studio is like an installation space for works which search soulfully in two directions simultaneously. There are the current oils and drawings which represent his most penetrating gaze, directed inwards through the intense expressions of the self portrait studies. These close-up portraits are currently hung together in the studio like a teeming crowd looking down from one large wall. But there are also a number of earlier Kite sky-scapes, hung here and there, around the studio or stored, leaned up behind easels and studio furniture. These Kite paintings produced in the 1980s, open up the whole studio space heaven-ward. The Kite paintings appear to be almost abstract at first sight and offer no visual foothold for the viewer but they carry a powerful phenomenological impact which can take you off guard and tear the gaze upwards in a dizzying ascent. Following the trail of the kites through clouds and misty atmospheres produces an intense physical experience – drawing maybe on some uncanny memories of being weightless and disembodied. The kites spiral up and beyond, soaring away from and over the earth.
These pictorial kites are not illusionistic depictions but abstract, fluttering shapes made by in-filling delicate colours between the patterns formed by their fragile strings or leashes. The leashes create a web of linear skeins which are precisely incised into rather than drawn across the picture surface. The fragile leashes lovingly entwine or twist, entrap and tangle themselves across unbounded skies. Here and there fields of colour suggest glimpses down to the earth as though seen from outer space. Each Kite painting is dominated by a different palette of blues and greys which creates shifting atmospheric effects or signals changing seasons and times of day. The series unfolds as another epic journey through time and space.
Looking through these earlier series of works, the ambition of Harris’s creative and spiritual journey can be sensed or partially glimpsed. Just as the Dove paintings charted a spiritual journey, so the Kite paintings can be understood to pre-figure his current project, Notes Towards a Self Portrait, which constitute a metaphysical odyssey of self-searching In the context of the current installation or hang of work in Harris’s studio, a mysterious formal relation can be experienced between the Kite sky-scapes and expressive self-portrait studies. Trembling outlines which trace and configure the marks of age and time on Harris’s face also echo the fragile threads of the kites leashes which criss-cross the uncharted skies of the earlier paintings.
Like the series Journey of the Dove, the Kites paintings could flirt dangerously with a romantic tradition of sublime or even more nostalgic cultural tropes of kites as metaphors of the transience of childhood, human hope etc. But once again, Alfred Harris’s purely visual expressions translate these metaphors into fresh and mysterious paintings which open up the symbolism to profound areas of spiritual and metaphysical experience in ways that cannot be put into words.
