What: Wilmington artist Britt Harrison's exhibition of oil and acrylic paintings Where: Caprice Bistro's upstairs sofa lounge, 10 Market St., downtown Wilmington
When: Opening reception featuring half-price cocktails is 7-10 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 10. The exhibition hangs through February.
Details: 815-0810 or www.BrittHarrison.com
Britt Harrison's online portfolio begins with antlers crisscrossing impossible red lines and Minimalistic shapes backdropping uncanny hands sychronizing into faces. It ends with representational works: emotional figures depicted in near Photorealism, save for their expressive streamlets of color.
In this wide range of style and scope we see Harrison experimenting, incorporating opposing painting techniques and an understanding of psychology to find a voice and style of her own.
Harrison, whose first Wilmington gallery exhibition opens at Caprice Bistro Jan. 10, graduated from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2011 with a minor in fine arts and a major in psychology. She employs her psychology background to think analytically about the human condition, art and her own artistic process in a way that informs her paintings.
"Recently I have been intrigued by imagery and nostalgia from childhood," Harrison wrote in her artist's statement for the show. "I like focusing on these parallels of associations that can change throughout time or through cultural differences. These oddities of individual perspective provide a lot of room to play."
Harrison has been painting her whole life, and before coming to UNCW she bounced around between art schools. She started in a traditional painting program working with oils at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro before transferring to New York University for a year, where the program was less traditional, more conceptual.
"That helped me build my theories," Harrison said. "It brought me to a new direction in painting, further away from studies."
By the time she transferred to UNCW, Harrison had decided she wanted to wind up in the field of art therapy some day. She switched her major to psychology and enrolled in painting classes with Ann Conner, chair of UNCW's department of art and art history, who transformed Harrison's view of Minimalism.
"Minimalism really annoyed me before I took (Conner's) class," Harrison said. "I liked it conceptually, but I never thought that I'd be painting in that manner … We worked with a lot of flat planes and juxtaposition of objects and colors."
Now, while waiting for the oil to dry on her more realistic works, Harrison enjoys working acrylic paint into compositions of Abstract Expressionism, as with one work in which thick lines intersect clouds of yellow, blue and burgundy – an intense island of color surrounded by solid gray.
Most of her new works, however, incorporate both worlds: realistic subjects entangled with abstract, Minimalistic elements. Three human hands reach into the frame of "Youthful Discretion," one holding a dog skull, the other two forming a canine shadow puppet. We don't see the shadows behind the odd confrontation, though, just geometrical patterns.
"It's fun for me, having studied traditional art and still lifes, to want to have one single focal point, or at least something realistic in the painting, because that's a challenge," Harrison said. "But it's boring to just try to recreate the scene. So I like to have some Photorealistic things that then just kind of spin off, like you're making your own dreamscape."
Harrison may some day return to school to pursue art therapy, but for now, she's happy painting on her own time, working at her own pace, looking for her own style.
"I'm usually all over the place," Harrison said. "I'm hoping to funnel down. I feel like in my career, I'll get on a pathway eventually."
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