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.

“I was privy to the land as being sacred, living very close to native people, going to a sun dance that really changed my life, my perspective on what I was destined to do with my life as a painter.” This contact also had the unexpected effect of sending Harry back to the region just northeast of his birthplace.

“This land has somehow drawn me. [When in Nebraska] I really startedpaying attention to my dreams, which is a very Native American activity, and dreams brought me back. I would have dreams of meetings with ancient longhaired dark people who would come to say to me: pay attention, something’s gonna happen, don’t close your mind. A few days later I had a dream I was with my daughter, who wasn’t even born yet, and showing her: look down in the ravine, at the white deer with the green antlers.”

Harry and Donna saved enough money, and made the move east. Starting in Baltimore, and working their way north, they got to Salem, New York where they found a house available on Blind Buck Road. “I didn’t even look at the house when we bought the place, I went out to the bridge, looked down at the trout in the stream, and realized this would be the place I would spend the rest of my life! And then to find out that the place is so much associated in the local lore with this huge white deer that used to be seen up the road. There were so many crossovers with dreams that I’d had.” Dreams that he had meticulously recorded in a journal, every day, since 1970. Harry had been paying attention, all right.

Academic gigs weren’t forthcoming in the area at that time, so Harry and Donna got work at the Albany Center Gallery, with Les Urbach at the helm. Urbach was credited with spreading the concept of publicly supported exhibition space, contributing greatly to the increase of galleries in the Hudson Valley, and Harry credits him with giving him the much-needed confidence to take his art to the next level and immerse himself in his work without any self-doubt. Harry’s side gig as a recreational art therapist was eliminated during the Cuomo administration, so it was sink or swim time. Harry got one of the best omens an artist can get: an old friend from Nebraska, Excelsior College president C. Wayne Williams, who had also moved up to the area and was familiar with Harry’s work said he’d like to purchase a few paintings. About seven thousand dollars worth of them, to be exact. Harry took this good omen as a sign that yes, he could—and should—be an artist. All the way. He’s never looked back.

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On a drizzly February day, Harry greets me gregariously at his old farmhouse on Blind Buck Road, leading me over the slippery ice to the studio out back, which is toasty warm thanks to an old woodstove in the middle. New paintings stand along the baseboards of the floor, where a full palette sits next to a multi-color pile of used paint. One wall has a selection of 15 paintings, all within the last month or two, a group that has a cohesive sense of a proper exhibition. Harry makes a reference to his time at the Ukrainian school, which like most Eastern European churches had a wall of icons, “faces of saints and sacred people. The metaphor is the same for me here: these are my ‘faces of saints.’”

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. The paint still on the brushes is put to use on a pile of 30 or 40 large paper sheets, which Harry goes through to find a spot that needs the color on the brushes. Each sheet has an ongoing image-in-progress: some are abstract, many have figures and shapes that have struck Harry in a funny way one day, fighting birds, dead soldiers, snippets from C-Span, sub-conscious bubblings. Harry gives little thought to the results. This part of the process seems to cleanse Harry’s creative “palate” as well as the palette and brushes, and he’s ready to hit the trail. Once onsite, he paints very quickly, especially in the winter, inside his van without its running (fear of carbon monoxide), trying to catch the light at just the right time often with three brushes in one hand, with his “canvas” mounted on his steering wheel.

To Harry, painting is half recording and half creating. “When I park and face the landscape, it’s only a starting point. I feel like this act is going to do something to me now, I have no idea what—it’s always a mysterious event to me. When I leave the studio, I say OK, I’m going to paint now, I get very anxious; I get a pain in my chest. There are times I go out feeling absolutely broken, and I’ll go out, and those environments will make a better painting than any other, and I’ll go home saying (with elation) ‘I’m cooking dinner!’” Harry even goes so far as to pick the nastiest, coldest day, bundles up well, and makes himself go out to paint. Every so often he has to use masking tape to help clear a small spot to see out through the window. Sometimes the harder he makes the process, the sweeter the redemption.

Though he does paint them quickly, that’s not to say that they’re rushed. The best of Harry’s work, and it is quite consistent in quality, is reminiscent of the great works of Monet and Van Gogh. Harry admits, “I love Van Gogh, but I’ve never had that conscious deliberate need to emulate him. It’s turned out that we have loved the same things. . . this is what brings our nature and character closer together. His intensity with paint is tenfold to mine.” The skill inherent in the powerful and confident brushwork is, however, definitely worthy of comparison.

It’s not the easiest life, but Harry and Donna have raised four children, and somehow managed. Harry is not at all a natural salesman, and is glad to have people like Carrie Haddad (of Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson) involved. Carrie first saw Harry’s work at Les Urbach’s Center Gallery in Albany, and she said it was a “one-person show, in a 10,000 square foot space! A line of paintings going along the perimeter of this huge space, one was more beautiful than the next. That’s when I started showing his work.”

“I admire his devotion. He’s an inspiration—I can’t believe his dedication to his art. He does suffer as a result, because he’s not pounding the pavement touting his accomplishments and getting more shows. He just paints and paints and paints, and lives a modest life. I’m totally in awe: he’s a purist, in the purest sense of the word. He really lives for his art,” said Haddad.

As kind and considerate as Harry is, I sense the pre-painting tension start to rise in him as it gets closer to sunset, with possibly usable light on this blustery day. I think he describes himself best when he says to me that he feels like “the Earth’s scribe for a short time, for the few decades I’m around.” He says goodbye, and quickly ducks into the studio to get his stuff and go. I head southwest towards home, through Harry Orlyk country, as an oddly beautiful shaft of light burns through the haze. No need to take a photo….don’t worry, Harry’s got it.

More information about Harry Orlyk and his work can be found at www.harryorlyk.com, and his work can be seen and also purchased at Carrie Haddad Gallery, 622 Warren St., Hudson NY, www.carriehaddadgallery.com, 518.828.1915.