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

This is my first one-person exhibition since 2014. That was also in one of Bill Busta’s galleries, the one on Prospect Avenue, which he closed the following year. I began showing in his galleries in 1989 and showed there regularly, usually every other year. I’m so pleased to have this show back in Bill’s fold.

These are selections from the body of work I’ve created in the intervening years. In those years I turned 75 and retired from teaching after fifty years. Both are reasons why I’ve spent some time thinking about how to define my practice in ways that I can sustain physically and financially over the years; how to make it possible to keep going.

I have always used materials to fit the goals of my work. I have had shows of drawings and wall drawings, shows of sculptures and constructed wall hangings, shows of pure painting. But I’ve always identified myself as a painter, and when I’ve painted it’s always been in oils.

I love the paint, and, in a way, I suppose the true subject of these works is the paint – its color, yes, but mostly its materiality. There is no intention of subject in them, although I recognize that quasi-subject matter sometimes emerges. When it does, it is most closely related to landscape although I’m not intending that when I begin a piece. They are intensely personal to me and not so concerned with a public voice as my earlier work was.

My studio walls and shelves are full of dried plant material, fungi, insects I’ve found dead on my walks, animal bones . . .These surround me every day. I look at them. I handle them. I am interested in what was the whole organism that they came from, but their real value to me is in their material realities, their colors, their shapes, their structure, their surface. By the richness of their color, shape and texture; by the look of fungi growing on smooth bark; by the tracings of insects on a branch revealed when the bark is removed. These are not so much different than the things that influenced my work when Susan and I lived beside the river in Cleveland’s Flats in the 1990s, except what I collected then included cast-offs of industry as well.

The paintings are built slowly, sometimes over a couple of years or more. It is not that they are technically that time consuming, but they are conceptually so for me. I might make a beginning that is promising and then let it hang on a wall while the paint dries, or longer, trying to let the painting tell me what comes next. Paint is added, paint is scraped off, dug into, so that rich surfaces are made. For me, the surfaces are the reward.

I want to stay out of my head and follow my hand and my heart while I paint. I want the paintings to have a quietness and a low ego presence. I hope they will be objects for contemplation.

WILLIAM BUSTA PROJECTS
15517 Waterloo Road, Suites 2 and 4 (up the stairs)
Cleveland, Ohio 44110
wbusta@sbcglobal.net
216.401.2752
Open noon-5pm Thursday, Friday & Saturday during scheduled exhibitions

EVENTS:

Don Harvey Selected Works, 2016-2026, April 3–25. Opening reception 5:30-8:30pm Friday, April 3, during Walk All Over Waterloo. Open noon-5pm Thursday, Friday & Saturday during this exhibition