Gabryel Harrison - Four Seasons 16 - 30 August

Electric Floral - Oil on canvas - 100 x 80 cm - $12,500

Gabryel Harrison

Four Seasons

Gabryel Harrison

Lilacs - Oil on canvas - 60 x 75 cm - $6,250

Four Seasons 16 - 30 August 2018 What a delight to have the gallery hung with the divine

Born in Tauranga, Gabryel lives and works in British

works of Gabryel Harrison. Here we see a collection

Columbia, Canada, this exhibition comes to us

of paintings by an artist who excels in channelling

direct from her Vancouver studio. Through the use

beauty. This gift, anchored by a formal arts training,

of translucent layers of oil paint, uniquely highlighted

complemented by skills honed and polished in the

and accented, Gabryel brings a contemporary

international arena of the art world, are the alchemy

energy to the genre of floral painting. These

of this memorable exhibition. In an age where graphic

paintings taking nature as their queue, capture,

imagery assaults, what a welcome change to be

celebrate and commemorate the transition of time

embraced by a worthy work of art. Here we see

in the natural world. They invite visual immersion in

a collection of paintings worthy of contemplation,

their effervescent beauty.

worthy of admiration, worthy of acquisition.

Frances Davies,

Director

Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance. Yoko Ono

202 Parnell Road • Parnell • Auckland • New Zealand • +64 9 366 6045 • fran@artcntr.co.nz www.internationalartcentre.co.nz 1

Spring When I was young, I would wander. Down to the muddy creek at the edge of our road, a drainage ditch really, but I was small and my imagination large. There was waist high grass, met by tendrils of the weeping willow tree, into whose great rough branches I would climb. I loved to be held within the circling green, to be hidden, to dip my own roots, as the willow, into the source of quietude and renewal. Not that I understood it then, but I do now.

This sensate relation with the earth, lying prone and examining a single crocus, a beetle or following, in inky darkness, the passage of stars to their vanishing point; this innocence, this devotion, is manifest in children, as in poets and painters. Decades later, no longer young, I find the regenerative quality of spring evident in its eternal return in all aspects of my work. Each time I pick up a brush I am in the anticipation, the curiosity and the expectation of discovery. Once again, I have been granted the grace to begin anew, to start over.

Creativity, like the seasons, has its fallow periods, but each time I approach a new canvas I embody Spring. My intention, resonating through me from the time an unknown artist first placed their vermillion hand on a cave wall, is to affirm life.

Spring is the bursting forth, change and vigour of youthful exuberance. My impatient self always searches for the first stalks of peonies pushing their red spears through black earth. Eagerly I anticipate the verdant green of leaves to come, and then, the perfume, the honeyed heaviness of unrivalled beauty. Gabryel

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Harrison

Roses Alba - Oil on canvas - 90 x 120 cm - $12,500

The seasons are what a symphony ought to be: four perfect movements in harmony with each other. Arthur Rubinstein 3

After Botticelli - Oil on canvas - 60 x 75 cm - $6,250

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Roses Singing In Periwinkle Blue - Oil on canvas - 62 x 77 cm - $6,250

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Radiance - Oil on canvas - 100 x 220 cm - $15,000

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Through The Green Fuse - Oil on canvas - 50 x 150 cm - $12,500

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Spring Bounty - Oil on canvas - 90 x 120 cm - $12,500

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Peonies This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart as the sun rises, as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers and they open pools of lace, white and pink and all day the black ants climb over them, boring their deep and mysterious holes into the curls, craving the sweet sap, taking it away to their dark, underground cities and all day under the shifty wind, as in a dance to the great wedding, the flowers bend their bright bodies, and tip their fragrance to the air, and rise, their red stems holding all that dampness and recklessness gladly and lightly, and there it is again beauty the brave, the exemplary, blazing open.

Do you love this world?

Do you cherish your humble and silky life?

Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever?

From New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver (c) Mary Oliver

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Red Abandon - Oil on canvas - 50 x 150 cm - $12,500

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Summer Summer here is not long, brief as fireflies or phosphorescence in a Northwest night. The palette of summer is for me associated with Kodachrome brightness, from hot red pinks and oranges through the harshness of titanium white singed caramel and crisp at the edges, like a marshmallow toasted in a beach fire. It is the ring of blackness touching the white hot ash of a match-tip struck.

The sun is at its peak. Punishing brightness dissolves colour like the flare of an old projector bulb burning film.

Everything pales, glare swallows sunflowers, goldfinch and the ripening corn. Bees are loud in the garden. Halo of pollen, golden combs in the hive.

I remember the indolence of holidays, the sense, leaving school, you could be anyone, reinvent yourself. Troubles seemed far away. Road trips beckoned, hood down, listening to the sultry classics: sea, sex and sun sung by Serge Gainsbourg, yellow line stretching forever ahead of you.

Like your life, it wouldn’t end. And yet; even as the day gives off the scent of roses petals fall summer gives way to autumn I think this is what lends Summer its great beauty. We know it will end. Nevertheless, we throw ourselves into it absolutely, heedless as the profusion of flowers, fully and with abandon. Gabryel

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Harrison

Aubade - Oil on canvas - 90 x 120 cm - $12,500

When I was little, we had bright yellow curtains in the library and when we went away for the summer, they were put in a box. And I imagined them in that box, glowing all summer long.

Joan Mitchell

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Allure Of The Sun - Oil on canvas - 150 x 90 cm - $12,500

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Carpe Diem - Oil on canvas - 150 x 90 cm - $12,500

To The Garden - Oil on canvas - 100 x 220 cm - $15,000

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Golden They Bloom - Oil on canvas - 90 x 120 cm - $12,500

www.internationalartcentre.co.nz 20

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Amore - Oil on canvas - 120 x 90 cm - $12,500

Carnival Of Peonies - Oil on canvas - 60 x 76 cm - $6,250

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Emissaries Of The Wild - Oil on canvas - 100 x 80 cm - $11,500

Passion Play - Oil on canvas - 90 x 120 cm - $12,500

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Summertime Roses - Oil on canvas - 90 x 120 cm - $12,500

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Autumn Trace of fire touches the world. Foliage loses its wild howl before surrender in a last blast of light. Harvest is on the land and in the trees. Golden orchards are laden with fruit; ripe, russet apples, crisp and sweet, wine dark grapes bending the vine.

Autumn begins in sensual richness and moves toward its own demise with quiet mists and melancholic light. In my part of the world, the wet west coast rainforest of Canada, streamers of swallows gather for their southern journey.

Autumn straddles the balance between fecundity and decay, bacchanalia and the monastic simplicity of bared forms. Trees shed their ball gowns to reveal the beauty of trunks and limbs lithe as arm bones. Autumn’s paradox is that while leaves fall and flowers wither, nature is also recklessly scattering her seed. She uses the wind, the wanderings of animals and birds, our own woollen coats and those of the dogs we walk, to spread her seeds of new life into the moist and waiting ground. Elegant armatures of seed pods, skeletons of plants like sculptures are left to grace our winter gardens, while the fallen seeds becalmed beneath their waiting white beds, dream the spring into blossom.

As I move into the autumn of my own existence, I perceive beauty in the fragile yet resilient ochre crowns of the hydrangea. I see wholeness where once, in the spring of my life I may have failed to appreciate diminishment and loss as necessary gifts. Effulgence and loss are held entwined in the hidden and mysterious circularity of our biosphere of unity. As the hours of sunlight and warmth recede in Autumn, so does the chlorophyll leave the plant; greening gives way to brilliant colour. It was there all along, just as our inner richness and complexity can be coaxed forth by loss. Autumn reminds me that to be fruitful, life must be in acceptance of both living and dying.

Gabryel Harrison

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Electric Floral - Oil on canvas - 100 x 80 cm - $12,500

Autumn Sonata - Oil on canvas - 62 x 77 cm - $6,250

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Born In Fire - Oil on canvas - 90 x 120 cm - $12,500

Ease is the way of perfection, letting fall. Annie Dillard

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Deep Autumn, Last White Roses - Oil on canvas - 62 x 77 cm - $6,250

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The Kiss - Oil on canvas - 90 x 120 cm - $12,500

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Winter There are some seeds that can only be broken open by wildfire, and some, some seeds need stress and the bitter grip of winter to grow and bloom in the spring.

It is not what you might expect, the centre of my studio is not my easel, not the moving table on which new colours and mangled tubes fight for space with brushes, rags and mediums. The centre of my studio is the hearth. It is here, most months of the year, it being the Northern Hemisphere and wood stove my only source of heat, that a fire burns brightly. It is here that I begin, with coffee, black, no sugar, to contemplate the day and how I shall redeem it. Often there lies before me the despair of yesterday’s work. The ruination of a painting brought to the edge and over.

My less experienced self destroyed many such paintings. Today, writing this on the edge of winter, I can say that all the long seasons I have spent in the practice of painting, that each mistake is perfect. Each stroke, tentative, impassioned, wavering or fierce, simply mark the trace of my journey. The gestures drawn, not drawn, the loss buried in the next strokes bold redirection were all necessary passage, initiations into what I did not yet know.

Everything is always in transition. My suffering was the delusion. This agony just youthful arrogance, to assume wholeness and integrity arises in a painting without repeated mistakes, or learning to endure the necessary tensions of emptiness, stasis, bleak destructions and annihilations. Experience teaches me the discernment of when to let a painting go, when to wait, to rest, when to follow the tracks and meanderings into its deepest harmony. This is winter.

Every seed begins in darkness. For the full fruition of our lives, to know the true depth and tenderness of our soul, we must accept even winter’s cold breath. To weather loss, a brush with death, or the isolating presence of a situation we may not have invited, we need to make an effort to understand if not befriend these unwanted, awkward guests. Winter hides within its white cloak, the enlivening potential for our fullest blossoming.

Gabryel Harrison

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Lilacs - Oil on canvas - 60 x 75 cm - $6,250

The smell of lilacs crept poignantly into the room like a remembered spring. Margaret Miller 33

Last Roses, Rosehips - Oil on canvas - 62 x 77 cm - $6,250

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Beyond The Window Snow - Oil on canvas - 62 x 77 cm - $6,250

Winter garden, the moon thinned to a thread, insects singing. Basho, translated by Robert Hass 35

On A Branch, Winter Light - Oil on canvas - 62 x 77 cm - $6,250 36

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Stars Circle & Too These Roses - Oil on canvas - 150 x 90 cm - $12,500

Studio Photographer • Kim Christie 38

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Studio Photographer • Kim Christie 40

Contacts Frances Davies • Director fran@artcntr.co.nz • 09 366 6045 • 027 4936 360 Richard Thomson • Director richard@artcntr.co.nz • 09 379 4010 • 027 4751 071 Trish Young & James Watkins trish@artcntr.co.nz • james@artcntr.co.nz +64 9 366 6045

202 Parnell Road • Parnell • Auckland • New Zealand • +64 9 366 6045 • fran@artcntr.co.nz www.internationalartcentre.co.nz

The Kiss - Oil on canvas - 90 x 120 cm - $12,500

202 Parnell Road • Parnell • Auckland • New Zealand • +64 9 366 6045 • fran@artcntr.co.nz www.internationalartcentre.co.nz