Painted in round 3— the HEAR round where each of 10 artists interpreted a short clip of music.

“Here”
18×18 in
Acrylic on canvas
2012

Photograph by Joe Martz

This painting is in the private collection of Amanda & Kyle Zinger. 

“On Earth, as it is…”
Acrylic on panel
24×48 in
2012

This painting is available for purchase. 

The piece incorporates several texture layers to diagrammatically represent a macroscopic image of a human iris. The central image is a contact exposure of photo-sensitive colloidal emulsion, depicting a dream-like image representing the eye’s inner perception. Each image in the series, red, green and blue references the cone cells of the human eye and the additive colour process central to colour vision.

36x36in
acrylic, india ink and photo-emulsion on panel
2011

This painting is available for purchase.
Pricing for this painting will reflect an increased materials cost. 

Sadly, this painting is also not a representation of a sunrise or a sunset.

trinity II

2004
acrylic on canvas
36x36in
This painting is available for purchase.

I like to ask people what they think the landscape depicts, and unfortunately, this is not a painting of a sunset or sunrise. The painting is actually an abstract representation of the first moments of the world’s first atomic bomb explosion – the Trinity test. The text carved into the painting, from left to right, explores the irony inherent in the fact that, mathematically speaking, models of the large-scale “texture” in the universe’s big-bang afterglow are good analogues of the math describing the first moments of the detonation of an atomic bomb. In a singularly 20th century acension day, that initial devastating creative act of “let there be light” awkwardly echoing Oppenheimer’s famous borrowing from the Bhagavad Gita: ”If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one… Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

It is a bleak, artificial landscape.

The other 3 paintings moved from this view of our destructive relationship with nature towards a deeper examination of the various ways that we relate to nature. The second painting was a depiction of a similar fiery destruction that is part of the natural order (i.e. forest fires).

The third painting in the exhibition was a representation of the  deeply individual experience of lying back in tall, fragrant grass on the edge of sleep at sunset on a warm summer’s evening- a direct, individual experience of nature.

The fourth painting examined the abstract quantum duality at the heart of our understanding of reality which is  a completely mental relationship with nature – both a benign opposite to where we started, whilst also being ironically full circle inasmuch as it is representative of the same science that gave us the atom bomb in the first place.

The text and linear grooves carved into the surface of the fourth painting examined the paradox that light can be described and observed as a particle under some circumstances and as a wave in others. Existing in different states was represented metaphorically as a Lake Huron landscape in which ice masses on the horizon towards the end of the melt while open water lies between it and the viewer onshore who looks out towards the ice.

After these four paintings carved narrative text has all but disappeared from my landscape work.

trinity

2001
acrylic on canvas
36x108in
collection of Janet McLeod

water (detail), by nik harron, 2001

This final painting from the original landscape series examines the abstract quantum duality at the heart of our understanding of reality which represents for me a completely mental relationship with nature. It is a benign opposite to where the series started with destructive human activity. It ironically completes the series by coming full circle to contemplate the same science that gave us the atom bomb test depicted in “trinity“.

The text and linear grooves carved into the surface poetically relate the paradox that light can be described and observed as a particle under some circumstances and as a wave in others. The reality of existing in different states was represented metaphorically as a Lake Huron landscape in which ice masses on the horizon towards the end of the melt-  in contrast to the rippling open water which lies between it and the viewer onshore who looks out across the lake.

water

2001
acrylic on canvas
30in x 90in
This painting is available for purchase.