ARTIST BRIAN HARTE
Brian Harte
Painter · County Tipperary, Ireland
Bold colour and topsy-turvy interiors, kept on the edge of failure.
Why this conversation
Brian Harte paints from a shed at the back of his house in rural Tipperary, close enough to the kitchen that the kitchen keeps wandering into the work. His big canvases are full of half-recognised things, a tile pattern, a teacup, a knife, a crumpled bed, and then, without warning, a floating table or an Egyptian head. He calls home an arena, a set where a family enacts its dramas. I wanted to talk to him about painting on the edge of failure, and about why he wants his pictures to behave less like a grid and more like a cloud.
The work
Brian Harte was born in 1978 and lives and works in County Tipperary, after a first-class honours BFA at the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork. He works mainly at large scale, circling one question: the relationship between abstraction and figuration, between the sketch-like and the finished. His paintings are held in public and private collections and shown by galleries around the world.
The studio looks more like a garden shed than a studio, and that closeness to home is the point. "The home acts for me as an arena for the paintings," he says, "a set where we enact all our dramas and potential." Bold colour carries figures that never fully resolve. The eye travels through richly detailed, chaotic spaces and slowly finds the familiar, a backsplash here, the outline of a cup or a knife there, set beside the frankly unexplainable: dismembered legs, floating tables, Egyptian heads. "As soon as you think there's a narrative there, it's gone," he says. "But I'm looking for that. I want them to be on the edge of failure all the time."
He will allow that the work "might be steeped in Modernism," but it is really a hybrid, the grid of the modern and the cloud of now. "I want them to look more like a network of things," he explains. "Disjointed maybe, but a network of things, because that is how we exist at the moment."
I want them to be on the edge of failure all the time.
Some highlights
The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany acquired two of his paintings for its permanent collection, and he published an extensive 138-page hardback of the last five years of work, "Bread (and other paintings)," with GNYP Gallery in Berlin. It was hard work to assemble, he says, but a real achievement, thanks to the people who contributed and designed it, and he is proud of it. He has shown internationally, including with Annarumma in Naples and Signs Gallery in Istanbul, and has been making prints of his work.
The conversation
Your greatest inspirations or influences?
If you become a student of art, you find the artists, living or dead, who help you understand yourself and give you a direction to follow, whether in installation, performance or painting. I won't list them all or we would be here all day. There is another side to inspiration, though. Hockney said it best: "Inspiration never visits the lazy." Perfect.
Tell us a bit about your creative process.
Get into the studio every day and work. Everything is chaos until you organise it somehow. If you are a painter, it is important to work in a rhythm and to hold a regular conversation with the images and with yourself. That determined process is invariably the key to stronger work, and to growing as an artist.
The work you are most proud of?
My children. (laughing)
Has the wider world changed your work?
I have simply carried on the process in the studio that I have been developing over the past few years. I do think the work has become less about my immediate surroundings and more about wider concerns. The drama of recent years will be filtered through culture one way or another.
A network of things. Because that is how we exist at the moment.
Buy art if you like it, and from living artists, please.
brianharte.ie @brian__harte
