Point Dume Beach ... Malibu, CA

ten years ago - to the day ...

excerpt from Pacific Chronicles © 2019 ...

What Is It About Southern California?

Probably more than I can explain, but I’ll try …

My enchantment with the Santa Monica Bay area (from Venice to Malibu) is difficult to articulate but there’s a certain chronology and specificity among its many attributes that I can describe with precise detail. 

The environment captivates my imagination, energizes my spirit, and awakens my senses to a steady flow of inspiration – like a continuous stream of real-time events veiled upon scrims – undulating to the pulse of the ocean’s relentless energy. It enriches my repository of sensations with countless images, sounds, and stories – fluid memories, Water Memory ®

The westside of LA has always moved with a cool swagger to the rhythms of earth – from the rugged, wave-beaten cliffs at Zuma and Topanga to the attitudes of Venice’s Eternal Beach. Here, culture mimics the very nature of an environment on the fringe of western civilization. Until now, there’s always been a distinctiveness inhabiting the Bay area’s spirit of place, but changes occur rapidly … 

My impressions of Southern California have formed an aggregated sub-script of memories and sensory data within a visual compendium of images and sound – one that is more unique than any place I’ve known. Few places on earth can do what it does to me. This is where I am reacquainted with my Muses. Muses that teach me the vulnerabilities of inspiration. Every inspiration, with its own character, requires nurturing and understanding to develop an intimacy with the subject. My Muses are conjured through a ritual of environmental behaviors and time-tested disciplines that allow susceptibility to this phenomenon.

Changing Seasons Vortex Mandalas, 2019

BOOKS of KNOWING, VOLUMES I - III, 1993 - 2018. Paul Harryn

Preview

Books of Knowing, Volumes I - III represents a stunning collection of one-hundred fifty paintings on paper spanning Harryn's twenty-five year odyssey through art and life.
The original paintings (22" x 30") are bound between three over-sized leather covers and were produced in Venice, CA - Eastern PA - Palenville, NY - Torrox, Spain - Paris, France and Sde Boqer,  Israel.
Each volume is accompanied by the artist's eloquent descriptions of his inspiration.

Cryptology ... Harryn

Cryptology, No.3
30"H x 40"W, 2019

Finding Time ... Harryn

FINDING TIME,   2018 - 2019
53"H x 96"W

Mandala ... Harryn

FINDING TIME, 2018
a meta-modern mandala
15 ft. H x 45 ft. W, ink on wall
Santa Monica, CA

the Ritual of Painting ... Harryn

Available for preview and purchase at Blurb.com

Commentary:

 The Ritual of Painting is a stunning record of Paul Harryn's lifelong dedication to exploring and understanding the world through his art. The book, richly illustrated with stunning reproductions, chronicles his ritualistic and highly original creative response to the natural, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual worlds we live in. As it samples work from all phases of his career, including sculpture, music, and writing, The Ritual of Painting is the record of an extraordinary artistic journey and entirely unique vision.

Richard Dee, author

School of Athens, 2019 ... Harryn

THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS
Paul Harryn, 2019
Acrylic paint of canvas, 72" H x 108" W
Allentown Public Library

Paul Harryn’s School of Athens

In the early part of his career, around 1976, Paul Harryn determined to undertake a series of art works based on influential philosophical, literary, and artistic sources. They were Prometheus Bound (from Rueben's), Prometheus Unbound (from Shelly’s play), The School of Athens ( from Raphael’s fresco), The Odyssey, ( by Homer), and In Search of Lost Time ( by Proust.)

Installed at the Allentown Public Library some 43 years later is the newly completed School of Athens. It is no simple thing to be in reverence and awe of Raphael’s masterpiece fresco at the Vatican in Rome. Formally, it achieves a height of brilliance in the lineage of art making that is incomparable. Its mere existence have stopped many an artist from continuing on. It is another thing, as is the case with Paul Harryn, to paint a major work with the same title and hold your own as a creator and artist.

The subject matter of The School of Athens is a paean to knowledge and values of reason, and to science and humanism. In both works, the composition is divided in half. To the left stands Plato, characterizing the Ideal. His attributes are Fire and Air, the insubstantial. It is a recognition of reality that transcends what we see. To the right of center in the picture stands Aristotle, representing the tangible and practical, whose attributes of Water and Earth propose solidity, things that can be measured. Or rather, what we see as real. All about them are other figures who fit into their side of the equation, and attributes all over representing the arts, music, science, mathematics, and philosophy. The figures overlap and move easily among each other. The composition uses architecture devised with linear perspective and orthogonal or perpendicular projections.

Am I describing Raphael, or Harryn? Or both? If you stand back, squint your eyes, and let them wander over the glowing canvas that Harryn has proffered up after so many years of consideration, you will be viewing the same affirmation that Raphael may have felt – the best humankind has to offer, and will continue to offer. We have to remember that Raphael lived in times seemingly no less socially precarious than our own. Yet this is precisely when Humanism took hold. The School of Athens by Paul Harryn is a joyous painting whose time is absolutely looking forward, just as the original School of Athens.

Clayton Campbell, 4.2019

Santa Monica, CA

Clayton Campbell is an artist, writer and cultural producer. He contributes to Flash Art, Artillery, After Image, among other magazines. 

His new e-publication of his original work, Tales From the Downside, Stories, Photographs, and Commentary, can be downloaded at no cost @ www.claytoncampbell.com/book-store/