Philip E. Harding

Arto-biography (1994)

 Though there is no prerequisite knowledge required to appreciate any art, it is not unlike watching a ball game. That is, the more you know about a given team, the more likely your attention will be engaged by the match. So, through this "arto-biography," I will say a few words about the origins of my work, the principle objectives, and something about the various elements and methods I employ. While I hope my art will speak for itself, I think some people might enjoy it a bit more if I provide a little background about myself and my art.

 During high school I remember being told that it was very difficult to make a living as an artist. Rather naively I thought it would be different for me. I was going to be a "real good" artist! However, after having a negative net income for the last five years while being at least a reasonably good artist, I must admit there is some truth to what I was told! Perhaps I should have taken the advice offered by many, and moved to a major art center in a big city. I have not.

 I am, first of all, an Eastern Washington studio artist. I have an attachment to this place. What is more, I do not find many artists in large urban areas who share my visual concerns. I am content to work like a hermit in a hut until I have enough work to approach national and international markets in my own way. I have seen many good artists leave eastern Washington only to have their time and energy swallowed up. For me, the important thing is simply making art. The art world can be more of a distraction than fuel for art.

 For a while I thought the smart thing to do was to get a degree in architecture as a kind of fallback position. I earned the degree with a minor in fine arts, cum laude, from Washington State University in 1983. My studies there became very esoteric: ancient geometry in the temples of Egypt and India, Islamic pattern making and symbolism, Chinese geomancy, lattice making and city design, numerology and color symbolism of various cultures. I took particular interest in shamanism and the arts of native cultures, perhaps imagining that I would be some kind of new age, organo, back to the earth, shaman, architect artist! I think I was looking for some absolute truth of art that might be learned and officiated over like a high priest.

 Following graduation, I briefly took a position in a fairly conventional architectural office that didn't really need a shaman. I grew restless, and couldn't bring myself to do the work. So in order to pursue fine art and my esoteric ideas full time, I quit.

 The work that I had been producing, both during my last years at Washington State University and the first few years afterward, consisted of a large series of mandalas. The first of these was based on a study of Gothic rose windows. They were fairly intense, brightly colored designs that were easy to like though not particularly original.

 The next series of mandalas was based on the geometry used to lay out Hindu temples. The temples employed various grids in plan and a variety of geometric methods to articulate the shape of their perimeters. I began juxtaposing temple geometry with a variety of other geometric systems. One geometric form used involved "squaring the circle." Another system involved laying out the five interconnected Platonic solids -- the dodecahedron, icosohedron, tetrahedron, octahedron and cube. I also played with other systems. For example Greek and Russian orthodox cathedrals contain spaces laid out according to the proportion of the square root of two and this system worked its way into several designs.

 Most of the mandalas developed in several phases. First, a geometric design would develop which pleased me a great deal, but which did not seem like much in the way of art. Next, I would do some oil pastel work. This would at times become quite vigorous and would obscure much of the geometry. Over several years I reworked various mandalas, adding new layers of oil pastel and scraping off old ones until they became something almost organic -- something I could never have set out to create. These have become very personal, spiritual meditations having little to do with the dialogues of modern art. I bring out a few when staging a particularly large showing of my work, but the bulk of the collection has been retired to long term storage in a basement.

 Following this series, I created a few works that are not really a part of any series: some rugged, basalt scab land inspired landscapes, a work juxtaposing a map of Africa against the world and the tomb of Ramses II, and a brief series of three works featuring a temple plan torn open with many small temple plans spilling out.

 I then worked on a series that had more in common with oriental calligraphy than geometry. I had become intrigued with the idea that a simple, gestural mark could contain great expressive force. I spent months making spontaneous little gestures in notebooks. Then I took the best of these and enlarged them with an opaque projector to 30 by 40 inch, black on white graphic designs.

 At some point my first horizon series emerged. These were rather austere minimalist works showing views of deep space through a series of proportionally divided windows. If this series was "about" anything, I would have to say it was an attempt to develop a sense of asymmetrical visual balance while maximizing proportional relationships of windows, bars, squares and rectangles. To me the series seemed very successful as it captured some of the absolutist sense of balance and space that the painter Mondrian had explored in the 1930's. Though the sense of aesthetic balance and harmony was very powerful to me, they did not prove very popular. Most are sharing space in the basement with the mandalas. At one point I perceived the squares as mental blocks I had been struggling with, and the bars as some kind of prison bars. I could not decide whether they were holding me in against my will or were protecting me from a free fall into those boundless, infinite spaces I enjoyed drawing.

 About this time a friend made an off hand remark that one of my pictures would look good with a ball bouncing through space. This seemed to fit my mood, so I created the first of my pictures with the sphere motif. The earliest sphere pictures were fairly simple. I continued the proportional studies with the windows and bars, but now threw in patterns of spheres. I liked the spheres because they had a kind of universality. I could use them to explore abstract issues of design involving proportional relationships between the sizes and spacing of spheres. At the same time, viewers could see them as molecules, planets, asteroids, bubbles or balloons. They created a nice visual balance by juxtaposing a fluid pattern of spheres against the rigid patterns of other elements

 About this time I introduced a star motif. It seemed the ideal device for producing the rather austere horizons with proportional windows into infinity, with the star adding a visual exclamation point. It has been very popular. The star is a universal, nonsectarian symbol of hope and spirituality. I have done quite a series of star horizons. The motif continues to emerge, periodically, in my most recent works.

 I should add that throughout both the horizon and early sphere series, I continued to rework mandalas -- some a year or more later. I also began reworking some of the horizon and sphere drawings and now have several large, very bold, fluid, oil pastel works that began as rather austere horizons but which were reworked about every six months for years before they seemed complete.

 At some point in the late 1980's, I began what I call my irregular shape series. This grew fairly naturally out of my morning warm up exercises. I had picked up a cheap ream of typing paper and, every morning with coffee, drew half a dozen quick designs with a black pen. Some of these were patterns of irregular shapes. I would set up little intellectual games for myself -- like drawing all pointed, angular shapes but making every line segment within a given shape a different length, or drawing a series of puzzle pieces with every piece a similar type, yet as different as possible. Eventually I became comfortable enough with this new vocabulary of shapes that I started including them in larger works on better paper. I began taking patterns of irregular shapes and juxtaposing them, first against simple rectangular bars and windows in space and then against increasingly complex geometric patterns. I also played with new background patterns. The simple horizons gave way to designs like contour maps against which spheres, geometric patterns and other irregular shapes were placed. Some of these were not so much like compositions, but rather a slice of some greatly magnified bit of plant tissue or mineral sample.

 At the same time there was a brief series within the series that amused me a great deal! I began looking at the various irregular shapes as one might look at clouds and realized that by adding an eye here and a mouth there, I could produce some very comic characters. These I identified variously as ghosts or gremlins. These seemed more interesting than others in the shape series for the simple reason that while it included some fine designs, the ghosts were good for a laugh!

 This period was a fairly frustrating time for my art. My slides were consistently rejected at competitions and I could not figure out how to best present myself to established galleries outside this region. If I sent a slide set showing the breadth of my work, I was dismissed as inconsistent. If I sent a slide set focusing on my horizons or one of my irregular shape series, they were dismissed as too graphic. This was, and continues to be particularly frustrating when applying for state or national grants that limit one's application to ten slides. When I had slides of over one hundred drawings, all of which I considered current work, how was I to present myself ?

 At this point I ended up taking nearly a year off. I qualified for a low income home rehabilitation loan and did nearly all the work myself. I also raised a large produce garden, and was able to sell some of the surplus each week at a Saturday market. In the fall, I began the study of Japanese language. There were a variety of reasons for doing so, but perhaps the biggest was simply to have some kind of regular, disciplined left brain activity. My drawing was limited to perhaps 30 to 40 hours a month with the rest of the time spent reading art history and urban planning, studying Japanese language, and watching more than a few hours of subtitled Japanese animation.

 My drawings in recent years have returned to some familiar themes -- spheres on horizons, and in various kinds of internal molecular spaces. I began layering patterns of spheres against various geometric lattice patterns -- patterns of rectangles, triangles or trapezoids. I tried adding texture and stripes to spheres. I introduced various Platonic solids in place of spheres and gave more structural or architectural treatment to the bars dividing the space.

 Occasionally the star motif reappears and most recently, I have played with various ways of breaking up the various grids and lattice patterns. I periodically return to oil pastel, sometimes reworking earlier pieces, but also doing some entirely new works in a rather flamboyant style.

 I have completed two large works in what may emerge as yet another series. These are in colored pencil but are not nearly so graphic as most of my colored pencil work. I see them as being half way between the more bold oil pastel works and the colored pencil works. I have also, for the first time since my school days, picked up acrylic paints and canvas. This is so that I can work larger, and get my work out from behind glazing. It also allows me to extend the value range beyond what colored pencils on black paper will allow.

Methods and Objectives

 I approach most of my work as a draftsman, using all the tools which that implies -- parallel bar, triangles, and templates. My media is simple enough, almost exclusively prismacolor pencils on paper. These days my favorite paper is Arches Cover Black. I'm also fond of Roma. It is a crisp, hard-surfaced sheet that takes the pencils like super fine sandpaper. Roma is also one of the few papers that can handle some erasing of colored pencils without destroying the surface. Colored pencils can be fairly unforgiving. A hard line, even on the best of papers, is nearly impossible to completely erase.

 There is a sequence in which colors much be applied. It is easy to cover a light color with a dark one, but very difficult to lighten an area saturated with a dark color. I try to layer colors up gradually, but even then sometimes create areas that are too dark to take more highlighting. This is one reason I like oil pastel. Pastels cover the colored pencil very easily, yet they too have rules of application. A dark pastel covers a light one more easily than the reverse. Fortunately one can scrape off a layer of pastel and add a new layer, or add a layer of a brand having a very soft buttery consistency over a harder brand.

 For me, drawing is a bit like improvisational dance. I know and have considerable practice with a variety of moves, but each time I apply them a little differently. As I described above, I work in series and sometimes on subsets within a series. I may introduce a new pattern for the border, a new type of grid in space, or a new way to organize some spheres. Then I try the idea in three to five variations before going on to something new.

 It is important for me to not wait for new ideas. If I think too hard, looking at a blank sheet and waiting to come up with the great new thing, then a mental block will develop which is very difficult to get beyond. If I have been away from the board, or if for any other reason find myself wondering what to do next, I usually break the ice by repeating some element from an earlier work with which I am comfortable, allowing new ideas or variations to present themselves as I work. They always do.

 Most of the colored pencil work begins in the foreground and works its way back into space. First a few spheres, then a proportional division of space to make a set of "windows," then a few more spheres... perhaps a geometric pattern of some type...maybe a string of spheres crossing the page in a different direction... or a star or a horizon... and finally a background of some sort... either a horizon into infinity or some more intimate atmospheric space.

 The last step is to give the picture a shot of a spray fixative. This is not to prevent smudging so much as to prevent "wax bloom." Colored pencils are simply a higher grade of the basic wax-based crayola crayon. Over time, this wax can migrate to the surface and form a white, cloudy residue above the color -- particularly over dark, highly saturated color areas. A good fixative will prevent this.

 My current preference, working with light colors on black paper, is partly metaphorical. It is like bringing light to darkness -- an almost spiritual activity. I want to evoke a bit of that sense of infinity -- the vastness of time and space one experiences when looking at the stars. There is something about the night sky that conveys a kind of spirituality, uncluttered by theology.

 My use of geometric patterns and spheres is also rather metaphorical. Geometric patterns suggest infinity as they can go on in every direction. They convey a sense of rational order and harmony. Geometry suggests something absolute -- the world of archetypes in the Platonic sense of perfect forms or ideas behind all physical form. On the other hand, a pattern of spheres or other irregular shapes conveys a different level of order -- that of endless, fluid change. Like the flames in a fire, clouds in the sky, or currents in the surface of a stream, there is at once constant change and a certain timelessness. It is like the rhythms of life rising and falling, always changing and always remaining the same. It seems very natural to juxtapose these two levels of order. It is like a balance between the rational and intuitive, the intellectual and emotional sides of ourselves -- a metaphor of wholeness. The imagery requires both technological skill and intuition to create, and it is my hope that the finished work will engage both the rational and aesthetic senses of my viewers.

 Finally, I found that there is something about geometry, spheres, and views of deep space that have a certain universality to them. They allow me to explore many abstract visual issues and yet remain a little more accessible to people who may not have training in the vocabulary of the more esoteric forms of modern art. While the need to create is a very personal one, it is ultimately the people who surround me every day for whom I must create.

 * Index

 * Time Capsule essay on culture with an introduction to the art of Philip E. Harding ( 1997 ).

 * Resume ( 1997 ).

 * Nuclear Reliquary project proposal ( 1996 )

 * Philosophical Statement ( 1995 )

 * Mythologizing Life essay ( 1994 )

 * Common Currency (1996)

 * Virtual Art Gallery ( under construction )