Earth's Scribe : Artist Harry Orlyk
by Ross Rice
Sure, you can take a picture. Take as many as you like of the rolling
farmland of the upper Hudson Valley giving way to the higher ridges
of Vermont and Massachusetts: cattle, sheep and horses, barns and silos,
old farm machinery, abandoned boxcars, rusting examples of man’s
mastery of the land, and inevitably, the land’s mastery
of man. But, as great as your camera is, and keen your eye, you may
feel something missing from the frame. Something deeper that can only
come from the soul of one who knows the history and significant magic
of the land, and can bring it to life with paint, linen, and. . .homasote®?
Even if you’ve seen this world before, you should take a moment
and see it through Harry Orlyk’s eyes, and see something more.
Born in Troy, New York in 1947, Harry Orlyk grew up in Cohoes, attending
Catholic school at the Ukrainian Church of St. Peter and Paul.
“When I was nine years old I knew I was destined to be not
only an artist, but a painter,” said Orlyk. “There are
some silly reasons why I began to think about that. My brother brought
a yearbook home, showing what high school students were doing in art
class, and here I was at the Ukrainian school with the nuns, under
a dictatorship!” The sight of those kids lined up at tables painting
away flipped the switch, and Harry went on to major in Art Education
at SUNY New Paltz, studying painting under the late Ben Bishop, in
whose class he met his eventual wife, Donna.
He continued his education at the University of Nebraska, and found
himself squarely on the academic track, teaching around Nebraska: Centennial
College, Doane College, Nebraska Wesleyan. Contact with the local indigenous
Americans had a lasting impact, and started an interest that for Harry
has become much more than passing.
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