Earth's Scribe : Artist Harry Orlyk
by Ross Rice
One thing that stands out at Harry’s studio is that there is
an entire wall devoted to arrowheads and points that he has collected
during his countryside sojourns. “I take a very serious interest
in the habitation of this place.” He does indeed; I’ve
never personally seen, outside of a museum, a more comprehensive collection,
arranged neatly by region and catalogued. During late night solitary
time spent in the studio among these artifacts, Harry has had the distinct
sensation of communing with the presence of their ex-owners and makers.
This connection to ten thousand years of human habitation of the Salem,
New York area is part of what gives depth to Harry’s commitment
to painting this land.
Unlike most artists, Harry presents his work unadorned: oil paint
on linen stapled to roughly 2’ by 3’ foot rectangles of
homasote® (compressed recycled paper formed into wallboard), frayed
edges and all. This has become somewhat necessary due to the sheer
volume of work, as Harry attempts to start a new painting EVERY DAY,
and usually succeeds. All of them are vignettes of the local farmland,
natural settings, but always with a human influence, usually dwellings
or machinery. This is an important aspect of his process, or as he
says, “Yes, we have to live here, but I want to show humans with some scale. There’s
always a human element still in everything I paint, but they don’t
dominate.” His painting style is definitively Impressionistic, with large depth-revealing strokes that
are often the result of his multi-brush technique.
Harry’s process, which he has evolved over twenty years or
so, begins with him warming the studio up (in the winter), and an unusual
cleanup method. The center of the palette is scraped up and deposited
on a large waste paint pile, its location determined by its general
color make-up, resulting in a globular work-in-progress...
CONTINUE... |
