Artist Statement:

Oceans and deserts fascinate me. They share special openness, an unending skyline, subtle changes in form and color as the sun moves across the sky, and demand that we adapt to them. They will not adapt to us. Both have an intense, vibrant presence – which is not surprising: deserts began life as oceans millions of years ago. I want my work to express that vibrant intensity.

My paintings usually grow of out of pencil, ink, or charcoal drawings done on site. Some are realistic, some are abstract – but in all of them I try to catch the particular quality of that slice of desert or ocean. In my studio the paintings evolve from the on-site drawings, my memory, and a multitude of small drawings I do at night as I think about the painting. Often, a particular scene, drawing, or memory will absorb me and I will do ten or fifteen paintings of that particular place – each painting investigating a different aspect of the site and my response to it.

My work was influenced by Cubism and the abstract expressionist painters Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, and later by the California figurative painters David Park and Richer Diebenkorn, and later still by Japanese prints and Chinese landscape paintings. Chinese “splashed ink” paintings of the of the thirteenth century – the artist splashed ink on wet paper and let the irregular ink forms suggest a landscape that the artist would bring to life through a few brush strokes – has particularly interested me. Most recently I have been influenced by the Chinese aesthetic of the singular importance of the ink brush stoke for creating the basic form, subject, and emotion of the painting.

– Myrna Harrison, Wickenburg AZ, May 2010