I grew up in the US Midwest, my father a Flemish painter immigrant - his influence and the tradition of Dutch realist painting set the basis for what I do. My roots are Midwest American, so Edward Hopper and George Bellows and the Ash Can School, but my philosophy leans toward the European social realism of the early 20th century that led to the Surrealist and Italian Futurist movements.

I make representational paintings that follow in the tradition of art that reflects the times in which we live. 

Painting is for me transforming a two-dimensional surface into an illusion of three dimensions. In a sense my still-lifes are works of virtual sculpture - I paint objects with consideration for their materiality, surface, and scale, then also create the setting for the objects. Tension is created by manipulating the distance between objects; mirrors and containers become metaphors and vessels for symbols.

My painting is about space, and within that space I watch the light and how it works. The still lifes are executed in shallow space, a requirement of the “trompe l’oeil” technique if the illusion is to be successful. Using devices such as photos, windows, and mirrors, I can add illusions of distant space to the composition. Thus a landscape, as a photo or framed painting, becomes an object, an element within the composition.

Form is intertwined with content, one informing the other. My paintings created in 2005-2007 reflect an air of fear, mistrust, and material acquisition. Objects lie close to the edges of the canvas, the periphery of vision; others loom in the background, threatening to break their containers. Some objects are only hinted, lie hidden, covered, bound, ineffectual. In these and in other works of this period, I questioned the ability of art to affect political change; that the artist was merely a player in the "entertainment industry." The still lifes, presented in the exhibition Shelf Life (Center for the Holographic Arts, NY, 2007) represented these and more personal concerns, an "accounting of my life as I grow old, in this time of war, destruction, and greed." My art is about who I am and the events that effect us all.

Current paintings, including one of the most recent Alchemy are studies in symmetry and elemental materials - the raw and the primitive.  I am looking beyond the present pessimism to a renewed belief in humanity, in Possibility through Art. Alchemy is transforming the base materials into gold, our base desires into hope.

Mary Harman

March 2008