Connie Harrison

Connie Harrison is a British artist, who lives and works in London. To Harrison, the natural world is both a muse and subject. She works by overlaying landscapes with different compositions, building up an overall sense of an abstracted landscape. Areas of the painting are carved away leaving marks, like pathways that lead you in, or exposing roots that lie beneath. The paintings themselves are balanced and appear weightless, we are suspended limitless within her abstractions. Colours hover and are meticulously placed over layers of opaque wax paste. Organic, natural forms and elements of landscapes, float between foreground and background, In and out of familiarity.

Through their varied surfaces, compositions emerge slowly, through a process of layering and stripping away oil paint and a wax paste, throughout the painting process parts of the surface unfold in texture, mark, opacity and colour, which overlay and entwine with one another. Stimulating movement and adding depth to the imagery as if they are growing.

Her process is a metaphor to the natural rhythms and circular life cycles. Paintings grow organically, layer by layer, working on and developing an underlying pattern, like leaves and sedimentary rock. There is a juxtaposition to the surface, deep mark making and exposed areas reveal iterations of the painting below. Working sensitively, developing a composition in response to previous stages of the construction. Each finished painting lends itself to the start of something new, one must come to an end to bring new life to the next.