I paint in oils and soft pastels, en plein air in rural Western Massachusetts or in my studio by the South River. I do whatever it takes to make the painting sing as beautifully as what’s before me–to do justice to nature’s glory, or the unique beauty of a human face.
I can’t include the touch of the breeze, the sounds of birds and wind, or the sensation of sun in my eyes or on my skin. I can’t capture every changing expression in a human face, the sound of a portrait model’s voice or the temperature in the room. Instead, I reach for colors a little brighter, a little more saturated than what I see, layering thicker and softer pigments over translucent washes to show all the hints of color in a shadow or a sunlit plane. I love painting on gessoed paper. The uneven surface captures pigment strokes and breaks up color, contributing to a feeling of life, air, and light. I scribble and scrub in my underpainting, staying fast and loose to get some of the world’s living energy onto my surface. Working in oils, I use spatulas and palette knives and thick paint. My sincere effort to form the paint into an authentic representation of what I see is captured in the texture and dimensionality of the painted surface.
I especially emphasize the color temperature I see because I’ve found it to be the best way to capture time of day, light conditions, even the heat or coolness in the air. Cooler colors become just a bit cooler; warms become warmer, often in the underpainting phase, to establish the importance of light and shadow to the piece. Overall I look for color spots, in the tradition of Hans Hoffman; I look for color shapes and prioritize them over line and drawing. I find this brings the finished work closer to the experience of being in the world.
I paint what I see and find beautiful as an act of love for the world, for the very fact that we see in color, that we have the capacity to apprehend beauty at all. It might have been otherwise. We might not have evolved to see and respond to beauty in nature, or even in one another. That we do is a gift, a miracle, and I devote myself to the worship of that miracle through painting. ~Hannah Harvester
