Working in primarily vibrant hues, Gloriane Harris has created a large repertoire over the last 50 years, working in both oil and watercolor. She’s created dizzying, vivid geometric abstracts, lush nature abstracts, and more figurative elements within the context of nature throughout the years, from feline to fossil.
No matter what the specific work, Harris dazzles with her palette, her form, and her powerful, dream-like vision. An exhibition of her work is now at BG Gallery in Santa Monica presented through the Venice Institute of Contemporary Art (VICA). 50 Years of Oil & Water – Gloriane Harris – 1969-2020 originally opened at ViCA in DTLA in 2020 but closed due to COVID-19.
Whether she is depicting a volcano, as above in “Edge of Kilauea” (1994), a delicate lavender fossil, or the sheen of smooth sea water, she creates a mesmeric pull with color and motion-filled, compelling images. Her geometric abstracts are hard-edged, sharp and witty; her softer, more flowing images have the texture of silk garments, the shape of petals, waves, hazy landscapes, and summer dawns.
Harris is a quintessentially California artist, both in terms of subjects and her approach. Unlike other artists who began their work in the late 60s and early 1970s, Harris took no part in an exodus to New York, choosing to paint under the radar in West Los Angeles. Working long-term in a SoCal-infused palette, she shaped light-filled, layered color-intense work that ranges in from neon and shades hot as an LA winter sunset to those as cool as a misty morning rainbow over Catalina.
Born in 1947 in Santa Monica, Harris is highly influenced by the season, the light, and the environment around her, saying “the light of the ocean and the beach in Southern California is like nothing anywhere else,” and terming that light the greatest influence on her painting.
Hers is the dazzle of sunlight on sea water, a sunrise barely rimming over the Santa Monica Mountains, an afternoon awash in the golden fire of a summer garden, the blue, golden-hour shadows of a summer dusk. Whether working in highly specific blocks, lines and circles as precise as targets, or creating her flowing abstracts, she shapes the life-force and raw beauty of her west coast home and inspiration. Neither tropical nor desert dry, her art longs for and celebrates water and light.
“Early Season Island” is blue and green and all angular perspective, like paradise viewed from sea, at a horizon-defying distance (2019); the work is somewhat of a fusion between her more impressionistic abstracts and the sharply focused patterned work in the artists’ career.
“Next Eclipse of Green” (1974), is cat’s eye and off-center target in extreme close-up; “Mutchka” (1969) is figurative and bold, a distinctive cat face textured behind a screen or grid (below).
Below, “Earthquake” (1974) is a play on measurement of seismic activity, depicting a circular, moving vibration measured in green, gold, pink and lavender.
The motion of lavenders and reds in “Dusk Dusk” (1974), below, is an abstract of soft-focus lines that contains elements of both harder-edged work and her watercolor abstracts of more recent years. It is both reflection of twilight on water, sky, and fading light on land.
Even in her less-frequent use of black and white, the viewer senses the resonance of Harris’ color-filled images.
Harris studied at Otis Art Institute, and worked with Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman on the first artists’ worldwide satellite broadcast at Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany in 1977. Her work has shown at a wide range of museums and galleries in the U.S. and abroad, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to the Palais de Beaux Arts in Belgium, and the Fahle Gallery in Estonia.
While Harris continues to paint daily, and taught at schools such as Otis Art Institute, El Camino College, and Cerritos College, she withdrew from the “art scene” in the late 80s, remerging now with ViCA, in a swirl of rich work, jeweled in glowing colors and shimmering with light. Exemplifying and amplifying the natural world has always been what Harris revels in; through her body of work, viewers join the celebration, California-style.
Genie Davis; photos provided by ViCA
