Don Harvey: Selected Works 2016-2026 at William Busta Projects

Don Harvey’s latest exhibition at William Busta Projects might not look like what you expect, and that’s what makes it so compelling. Harvey is best known for his subversive paintings of figures and animals emerging from evocative geometric landscapes. His current work, however, eschews public expectations in favor of deep introspection. Shaking off the burden of representation, Harvey’s new paintings convey an exhilarating sense of freedom, experimentation, and the joy of an artist who has worked for decades for the privilege of pursuing art on his own terms.

In a series of 20 abstract paintings created between 2016 and 2026, Harvey plumbs the depths of his life and creative practice. “In those years, I turned 75 and retired from teaching after 50 years,” Harvey reflects. “Both are reasons why I’ve spent some time thinking about how to define my practice.”

Harvey, who spent decades as a Professor of Art at Akron University and as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Oberlin College, describes an almost symbiotic relationship with his students. “I learned from them, and they learned from me,” Harvey explains. Teaching also gave him a flexible schedule, allowing time to maintain his studio practice while advocating for the arts community. He co-founded the Committee for Public Art, which later became Cleveland Public Art and, eventually, LAND Studio. His advocacy also included co-founding (with John Coplans, then Director of the Akron Art Museum) Dialogue Magazine–a pioneering forerunner of CAN Journal that championed Midwestern artists.

Harvey’s own work often explored the natural world and environmental refugees displaced by ecological disasters; however, “at a certain point,” Harvey observed, “the world swamped the idea, and I began to feel like an opportunist.” Instead of abandoning his practice, Harvey began experimenting. At first, he attempted to include representational elements, but the “paintings kicked them out. There were things I really liked, though, and I thought the way to go is not to have any a priori ideas. Just let the paint tell me what I can do.”

The resulting body of work reflects a period of refreshingly pure artmaking, when Harvey dedicated himself to painting for its own sake, not merely to feed the insatiable appetite of the commercial gallery circuit. While Harvey consciously avoids painting recognizable subjects such as trees or grass, he acknowledges that “quasi-subject matter sometimes emerges,” especially echoes of the natural world.

Harvey’s painting Sottobosco feels like an artifact of an emotional encounter with the forest floor. Not a portrait of a specific patch of ground, like Dürer’s iconic Great Piece of Turf, but rather a lingering shadow of a life steeped in nature. Across the canvas, dark ovals emerge from a tangle of reed-like slashes, sometimes obscuring, sometimes revealing the luminous golden-brown background. A twisted horizontal line seems to weave through the paint, flanked by stripes of cerulean blue that evoke rain and pure mountain streams. The piece is an intoxicating study of the science of optics, the properties of paint, and the intimacy of brushstrokes that connect the artist’s hand to the viewer’s mind across space and time.

Although the title Sottobosco refers to a 17th-century Dutch still-life genre depicting tangled undergrowth, Harvey did not intend this association from the outset, naming the work only after the similarity revealed itself. Another piece whose title is the result of an associative afterthought is River Dance. Here, Harvey creates a flowing field of blues, greys, and titanium white, textured with overlapping grids of gently undulating lines. Swirling rivulets of thick paint cut across the paper, opening up but never definitively fixing the resemblance to waterways twisting across a shimmering plain.

The painting Two Moons forms a tantalizing bridge between Harvey’s earlier representational work and his current abstract practice. Glowing against an inky black background, an orb of golden hatchmarks dominates the pictorial plane. The lines of paint evoke the feeling of gazing out a window through a tattered straw screen. Through a gap, a tiny landscape emerges: rolling black hills, the hint of a river glittering beneath a crescent moon, and a star-speckled sky. A large, spiny growth traces a second crescent across the orb’s face, mirroring its miniature counterpart within.

Another major consideration in Harvey’s new body of work is materiality. Whether using construction debris from his father’s machine shop or collaged images, materials have always been the driving force behind his work. Harvey’s first medium, however, was oil, and a recommitment to painting drove his last decade of creation. The title of the series, Fat Paint, for example, refers to the pieces’ chunky surfaces and perhaps to the process of “fattening” paint by adding oil. In these diminutive works, juicy swipes of pigment are manipulated with a plasterer’s trowel as Harvey repeatedly builds up and scrapes off layers, sometimes over the course of years.

The exhibition also features six of Harvey’s artist books, presented in a range of media and materials, including a delicate, metal-framed volume composed of printed transparent film that shivers when you breathe—a fitting tribute to the environmental precarity it addresses.

Regardless of the medium, Harvey’s work reflects a lifetime of self-discovery through dedication to his craft.  “I think if you’re honest with your art, and maybe if you’re honest with your life, you need to continually find out who you are,” Harvey reflects. “ I know a piece of artwork is done if I can see myself in the painting. Not something I learned from somebody else, not some extraneous thought, when I know that it was me, that’s when the work is done.”

Don Harvey: Selected Works will be on view at William Busta Projects until April 25. For more information on the artist and exhibition, contact wbusta@sbcglobal.net

Don Harvey: Selected Works 2016-2026
April 3 – 25, 2026

William Busta Projects
15517 Waterloo Road, Upstairs
Cleveland, Ohio 44110