Joan Harrison

Artist Statement

Joan Harrison's images have been exhibited and published Internationally and are included in many private and public collections, most recently that of the Morgan Library in NYC. She is a Professor Emerita of Long Island University, where she taught art and photography for many years and has had residencies at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY and the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy.  Joan has a deep creative connection to nature and the North Shore of Long Island where she and her husband Michael E. Ach, a fellow artist, live and work. Art runs in the family, their two grown daughters are also artists.

    The chalk pastels in the "Translations" series are amalgamations of how the eye and the mind perceive light on landscape. Alternating between the abstraction and specificity of nature, these paintings in pigment are a perceptual record of sea and sky on Long Island, with an occasional foray into other places that resonate with a similar spirit. Color and drama are important elements of the work that was initially inspired by British artist William Ascroft's (1832-1914) "pastel paintings" of London sunsets that document the atmospheric effects of Krakatoa's eruption in 1883.

Obsessed with paper as well as light, fantasy collages and small paintings fill the studio when night or the weather precludes landscape work. Pulling from bins of vintage ephemera, advertising flyers, and all matter of flotsam and jetsam collected on travels through the years the pasted papers are often combined with drawing, watercolor, prints or threaded passages. These pieces are intimate and mysterious environments that draw the viewer in.  Joan has fond memories of visiting Woodloch Pines as a child and is thrilled her work is being shown in The Lodge at Woodloch.