Laura Harris
By Robert Amos

Laura Harris with Ray Ward at the Main Street Gallery, 1-2449 Beacon Avenue, Sidney, 656-6246, until May 15

Last week I wrote about art inspired by church and synagogue. The week before, it was art in the service of an idea - an intellectual approach. This week I give myself up to art inspired by a feeling. What might be dismissed as “merely decorative” is revealed to have a soul.

Laura Harris, born in Sidney and now of Cadboro Bay, is having a show (with Ray Ward at the Main Street Gallery, 1-2449 Beacon Avenue, Sidney, 656-6246, until May 15). There is a joyous sense of homecoming for this young and popular painter, who is the daughter of Heather and Cliff Burrows of Sidney.

Those parents have reason to be proud. The well-appointed gallery seems to glow like Alladin’s cave with Harris’s rich colours. On crusty canvas she sweeps and soaks films of tint and tone. When all these layers of colour really feel good to her, Harris inscribes this integument with a flower or two.

It looks easy. Some of the flowers are red, some are white. But I was surprised to discover a depth of metaphor I hadn’t suspected from reproductions of her paintings.

“This one is titled Courage,” she said, running her hands over the large canvas before us. “It has a glow of the female, with the twirly bits, and the smooth skin: she’s lovely.” A single very red tulip, a delta of pyrrole red, blazes over a leathery field darkened and scarred by all the experience of life. The painting is finished with an unctuous flow of gloss varnish.

Harris is poised on the brink of big success, but she's a small town girl at heart. She remembered high school at Parklands. In 1987, her final year, she had three dance classes and two drama classes. “That was it!”, she recalled with pleasure. She then worked as a graphic designer for 8 years. She had never considered becoming “An Artist”.

A chance encounter with a Jimmy Wright painting that changed all that.

“I was at the Sooke Art Show and I saw one of Jimmy’s dogs. This was pre-polar bear period. That painting was so raw, and not at all perfect. I suddenly realized that art could be... I used to think it had to be a certain style - that being an artist was like being in a club. But Jimmy’s painting was different. I could relate to it. I loved it. I wanted it!”

After a few instructive lessons with Wright, and the encouragement of artist and gallery owner Kristine Paton, Harris felt enough confidence to leave graphic design behind. It was about that time that she married and became mother of a daughter, now three years old. Her supportive husband, both sets of grandparents and a nanny helped make possible this chance to develop her native talents.

Harris is fairly new to the art game, but she’s jumped in with both feet. She’s had three shows in the past ten months and all of her work sells! The first show was at the Avenue Gallery (2184 Oak Bay Avenue) where Harris enjoys the support of owner Heather Wheeler. The second was a well-received debut in Whistler. The third is here at her “home base”.

The frantic pace is driving her creativly forward. Lately she’s left the flowers behind, relying on drenched fields of colour to convey her message. She hasn’t run out of ideas yet. Faced with “another blank canvas” she remembers Victoria artist Terry Coady’s advice: “Just attack it. Don’t think about it. Attack it!”.

Harris’s painting style is aggressively physical. Her emotional involvement is tangible, palpable. Face to face with her coloured panels, I have become aware of the metaphors which lie just beneath these apparently simple surfaces.

As we sat before her large painting, Fire and Water, I told her how it reminded me powerfully of a great late oil by the English artist J. M. W. Turner - that dramatic chromatic play of sun on sea, all tempest tossed. No surprise - she’d never heard of him. But she had created all that and more.

In the foreground of her painting stand two red hot tulips loosely held upright in a lissome vase. To her they represent a couple, tenderly touching: “a couple protecting each other through a storm.” I understand what she’s saying, I see it and I feel it.

Copyright © 2005 Robert Amos Robert Amos is an artist and art writer who lives in Victoria, B.C.. He can be contacted by e-mail and you can view his paintings at www.robertamos.com