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Kaleidoscope Dreams
At first sight Sarah Harvey’s
paintings – of figures floating in pools – seem to be of a familiar
subject matter within contemporary art, the theme a useful pictorial
device for the exploration of whole range of abstract painterly effects.
They do indeed do just that and with great technical virtuosity too but,
look again, closer and harder, and it becomes increasingly apparent that
something else, altogether more interesting and personal is going on, the
obsession with a theme that has dominated her work since her last year at
art-school - some five years already – a clear indication that her
artistic imagination has been engaged, that she has, in this specific
subject matter, begun to find the first mature expression of those ideas
that made her want to become a painter in the first place, from her
account of it, something her teachers both at school and college seem to
have done their best to deter her from!
The turning point, five years ago,
came during the course of a travel scholarship from Newcastle University,
when she discovered a green painted open air-swimming pool in the Tuscan
hills near Lucca Situated beneath trees, the effect was of swimming
seemingly suspended between and immersed in green water and green light,
its spatial ambiguities suggesting “a whole new undiscovered world
beneath”, as she puts it, where her “imagination begins to work in
overdrive and I come up with all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas of
what could be lurking below.” At the same time, it has also to be said,
the theme has also been the means of expressing her very sensual delight
in water - “I absolutely love the water to look at and also when I am
playing in it” - as is very apparent from the joyful exuberance of her
handling of light and colour across the surface of the water and the
figures. In short the subjects, essentially always a self-portrait, for
she is the swimmer in the photographic images she uses as her pictorial
starting point, have, over the course of the last five years, become a
powerful visual metaphor for the expression of both the exuberant and
physically extrovert side of her personality and evidence also of a more
complex and introverted sensibility, or what she admits to as “notions of
insecurity, fantasy and sexuality.”
In these latest paintings, which
cover a wide range of watery geographical locations from the Jog Falls in
India and the Red Sea to Hampstead Heath Lido, these themes are pursued
with increasing richness and subtlety, the largest and most ambitious of
the works on show, Kaleidoscope Dreams, with its split-mirror image
of the swimming figure and black hair streaming spikily out into the
water, among the most arresting and curiously disturbing images she has
yet produced. Moreover its now extremely radical fragmentation of the
figure within the ripples of water has not been allowed to become a mere
exercise in virtuosic abstraction but, rather, makes itself essential to
the expression of the work’s emotional complexity. One of the great
American critics of the post-war period, Harold Rosenberg, once shrewdly
observed that “Painting is the same metaphorical substance as the artist’s
existence”, a process, in effect, that reveals the personality of the
painter. If that is indeed true, as I believe it is, then in Sarah
Harvey’s case it is, these paintings are the witness of a gifted and
emotionally committed young artist.
Nicholas Usherwood
September 2008
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