David Harrison was born on 1954, Lives and works in London. Harrison is an artist attracted to the day-to-day oddities that are often overlooked by most people. His paintings are populated by fantastical characters and wildlife placed in eerie, otherworldly settings. Taking traditional subjects of landscape and myth the artist creates magical tales that are relevant to our time and make strange our relationship to the natural world. Fairy tales have been an important influence in Harrison's work from Alice in Wonderland, The Master and Margarita and Gogol's short stories to British writers such as Cowper Powys, Mervyn Peake and Henry Williamson. In all these stories, as in Harrison's paintings, the natural and supernatural go hand in hand.



Harrison's works are created on surfaces ranging from rough wooden panels to larger canvases and vary from intimate, naturalistic studies to elaborate compositions. They are unified by Harrison's approach, which combines the fantastical with the real, the magical with the everyday. His paintings often tell of man's impact on nature and of nature settling scores in elaborate twists of fortune. Surrounded by the dirt, detritus and blighted urban decay of humanity, his creatures inspire a sense of wonder and remain powerful witnesses to man's vanity and foolishness.

David Harrison's paintings are very odd - even eccentric - and very English. There are a few fairy folk in there, along with the great crested grebes, the barn owls, the scrupulously detailed butterflies, and the bowler-hatted urban fox. A long-tailed tit feeds her clutch, nested in the eye socket of a grinning human skull.

Harrison might almost be a marvellous, old-fashioned children's book illustrator, if not for the sex, the intimations of old age and death, and what I am forced to take as genuine pantheist mysticism, along with a ribald sense of humour.

Conclusions:

Harrison is an artist attracted to the day-to-day oddities that are often overlooked by most people. His paintings are populated by fantastical characters and wildlife placed in eerie, otherworldly settings. Taking traditional subjects of landscape and myth the artist creates magical tales that are relevant to our time and make strange our relationship to the natural world.

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