T.A. HARRIS
(Thomas Anthony)
BIOGRAPHY
I’m an artist, pretty much native to Seattle, (50 years), only having left for four years to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, taking degrees (BFA, MFA) in photography. Previous to that formal study I spent my twenties working as a self trained painter.
Realizing the limitations of self study, partly due to a long trip to Europe, I decided to formally study photography, a medium with which I had become enamored, partly due to photography gaining traction as a serious fine art medium in that period (1960s and ‘70s). This was intriguing to me due to an affinity for color. Color photography at the time was an unexplored medium outside of Popular Photography/National Geographic travel, snap shot literalism. Only a few photographers were beginning to explore the possibilities of a personal take on the color image, i.e. aligning images with perception in new ways. In addition, I was intrigued, and explored non-silver and obsolete monochrome print processes.
After RISD, I returned to Seattle starting a new life as an artist with a family. I worked as an assistant to an architectural photographer, taught classes, was a Media Tech at a community college and freelanced to support my growing family (two children). In 1983 I began teaching classes at the Art Institute of Seattle. Besides photography I taught drawing, design, media, art history and other classes as needed. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s I worked at drawing, drawings that finally helped shape a project I called “The Shadow Boxes”.While on a trip to England, I saw an image of a toy airplane draped with a dead minnow in a box, that was beautifully lit. I had a wow moment and swiped the image’s idea of a box because it provided a context for creating a sort of cabinet of curiosities of stuff found, altered and created in 3 dimensions to be photographed. The photograph was the final exhibited product of the process.
I exhibited widely across the US. receiving many awards for the the Shadow Box series. Honors culminated in 1996 with being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for photography. In 2004 I was honored with an Artist of the Year Award for the second time from the Seattle Arts Commission. In this period I was given gallery and traveling shows of my work.
Two thousand eight was a year of transition: retirement from AIS, divorce, establishing a new life and a gradual movement away from photography as my primary medium. Painting and drawing became more important and I pursued the new project enthusiastically. In 2013 I re-married and moved to Yakima, WA to escape Seattle’s gloom and expense. Since then, I have become involved in a new art scene centered in local exhibition venues.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I began my art career painting (mostly self trained), and took formal education in photography earning my MFA in 1978.
The Shadow Box and Ara photographs, both continuing projects, were developed with drawings and trial photographs, over a fifteen-year period, combining two related but parallel lines of development. Drawings, unrelated in image, helped establish the environmental “feel” of the photographic images. The sets and objects in the photographs are fabricated, found, or found and altered. The tableaux are conundrums hinting at the limits and limitations of knowing. The formal qualities of the images perfectly mirror the circumstances of my life.
I consider the prints (silver and platinum) to be the final product of a conceptual drawing and fabrication process. The installations are given their final formal and perceptual context in the photographic print. I worked since early 1997 with hand coated platinum prints, to gain a greater sense of depth and solidity to my images. In so doing I have transferred the graphic qualities of the drawings to the unique quality of the photographic image.
I have continued working with the Shadow Box Series but have changed the emphasis from the sets and objects to the photography itself with the creation of an ‘inhabited’ space through the use of medium format, 8×10 and 11×14 equipment rather than 4×5. This has allowed me to explore new emotional territory and expand the possible graphic effects.
In 2003 I spent three weeks in Edinburgh, Scotland. While there I discovered, quite by accident Greyfriars Cemetery. The cemetery resonated with me because of it’s powerful sense of history, it’s primitive Baroque monuments and the fact that some of the first photographs were made there by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in the 1840’s.
The cemetery is badly in need of restoration but is a trove of photographic images.
The images of the cemetery and its monuments build on and continue the exploration of the themes of the Ara and Shadowboxes.
PAINTINGS
My paintings are the latest part of my total output of some fifty plus years of picture making. I began my career as a painter, but took my art degrees in photography. My work in photography evolved through both black and white and color, color photography was additionally important to me early on (late 1970s) due to its link to my work in painting.
My last series of photographs called the Shadow Boxes were black and white images based on an intensive period of drawing from 1989 to 2005. The Shadow Boxes suggested a proscenium stage, that provided an environment for objects that were found, altered or fabricated. I write this as it establishes a link between the photographs and the recent paintings. I mention this project due to its long duration and pertinence to my present work but obviously I can’t provide examples. I received an Artist Trust Fellowship for the Shadow Boxes in 1996.
Painting on paper and canvas I’ve applied to panels, I use a combination of collage, pastel, powdered pigment, casein, dispersions, alkyd and wax. As with the subject of the photographs, the paintings are constructed from a variety of materials set in a matrix off a landscape. I call this new series of paintings the Towns.
The influence for my recent paintings of the Towns is my perception of the, still new to me, dry and tawny landscape of the hills surrounding Yakima. It is akin to a stage set (a valley with surrounding hills) ready for a performance or imagined structures. I moved to Yakima from Seattle in 2013. Since leaving the gloom of western Washington to the dry desert of the eastern part of the state, the tone of my work has lightened. The Towns express a content that is not new in my work. But it has taken a new form.
EDUCATION
BFA 1976, MFA 1978
Rhode Island School of Design
Providence, RI
AA Photography 1974
Everett Community College
Everett, WA