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| "Villa Aurelia Light" by Bunny Harvey, 1995, pastel and charcoal on paper | |||||||||
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| "December, Villa Doria Pamphoilij" by Bunny Harvey, 2001, gouache on paper |
Bunny Harvey's
BIG PICTURE
Rare hometown show for internationally acclaimed Providence painter celebrates her cerebral art
BY CHANNING GRAY
Journal Arts Writer
The biting smell of turpentine mixes with late morning light and strains of Beethoven wafting from a stereo.
Tables are covered with squished tubes of paint, books on Chinese calligraphy, shards of pottery from ancient digs, a circle of stones belted with white stripes.
Broken bits of mirror are propped against walls, along with industrial junk that could pass for modern sculpture -- a tangle of chains, a rusted spring, a triangular scrap of steel.
Paintings of Vermont, a Tiverton cornfield and an icy Arctic vista line an expanse of white wall.
This is where Bunny Harvey makes art, a sprawling loft in Providence's Jewelry District, where nearby rooftops are visible through the haze of plastic stapled to the windows to keep out the cold.
It's far from neat, but it has its own sense of order that reflects Harvey's longtime interest in the notion of place, something she has grappled with in her art ever since winning the Rome Prize more than a quarter-century ago.
The striped stones were collected on her world travels, the industrial trinkets mined from the alleyways near her studio.
This sixth-floor chunk of former factory is Harvey's refuge from meetings, from e-mail and the trappings of a teaching job, a sanctuary where she can practice a mysterious process that she seems to be getting better at, although understanding less.
"I've made this world here that's feeding me back with stuff that's a complete surprise," said Harvey, who's currently showing her work at the Wheeler Gallery, a rare local outing for her.
"I'm not in charge anymore. Now somebody is coming back at me when I paint, and I'm not sure it's me."
Pushing the envelope
Harvey, 55, is sitting on one of two butcher-block-framed couches covered with beige cushions, clustered around a tattered Persian rug and a battered cypress table she picked up at a yard sale for $25. Her graying hair is pulled back in a bun that's secured with a paint brush and a single orange chopstick. A rust-colored scarf is looped around her neck, the one dash of color against her black slacks and pullover.
Her dark eyes seem in a constant state of questioning, searching for what lies beneath the surface of things. She's slight of build, but tough, an adrenaline addict who loves to push herself.
Harvey is just back from hiking in the Arizona mountains with her filmmaker husband, Frank Muhly. Last year she took off alone to the Turks and Caicos Islands to learn to swing on a trapeze 35 feet above the ground. She wanted to spend her vacation doing the "scariest thing I could find."
But then, Harvey's life has always been something of high-wire act, a triple somersault of heading up the painting department at Wellesley College, keeping house, and helping raise a talented son, 19-year-old composer Nico Muhly, who attends Columbia and Juilliard.
That's why she's been so adamant about carving out a space where she can leave behind the rat race and explore her passion for paint and canvas. Making art for Harvey is like solving a Zen riddle, like "inventing a vocabulary," as she puts it, "for something you don't know how to say."
She thinks of the blank canvas as an archaeological site that she mines, digging deeper and deeper to find its treasures.
It took her two years to complete Arctic Echoes , a dark, primal work full of shimmering icebergs and an eel-like creature. The painting is one of several large canvases, along with drawings and gouaches (paintings made with opaque watercolors), in the Wheeler show.
"It got to an exciting place quickly," she recalled, "but then got stuck. I felt intimidated by this foreign place I didn't know, by my lack of knowledge."
Harvey would take out the painting, ponder it, then put it away, until the missing ingredient hit her -- sound. In the throes of inspiration, she grabbed a tube of cadmium red and squeezed a blazing arc across the expanse of midnight blue, then blotted the paint to make more red curves to suggest the cracking of ice. Done.
"Painting is a journey for me," said Harvey, whose canvases command upwards of $40,000. "I'm not an illustrator who manufactures what I know. If I knew where it would wind up, it would be too boring. That doesn't do it for me."
A study in nonconformity
Harvey has always been something of a maverick.
As a kid, she took Saturday morning classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan. "I liked the smell of it, liked it because artists wore strange clothes and didn't look like my parents, and because I was turned on by the nude models, even though they were these baggy old guys."
As a student at RISD, she was painting recognizable images when everyone else was filling their frames with stripes, squares and splatters.
She takes her inspiration from books on particle physics, dig reports from archaeological sites and the haunting call of the whippoorwill. She's known for her landscapes, but can easily shift gears into abstraction, making it hard to pin labels on her.
"I don't get a lot of ideas from contemporary art," said Harvey, who two years ago won a Pell Award, given by Trinity Repertory Company to leading local and national artists. "My last resource is the art world."
"She's always stuck with what she believes in," said Virginia Lynch, who's shown Harvey's work in her Tiverton gallery. "She's not swayed by what anyone else is doing, or the current trends, and I admire her for that."
Because of that independent streak, Harvey was pretty much resigned in the early days of her career to a life of teaching art at an alternative high school for $2,600 a year and sharing an $80-a-month downtown loft with Muhly.
Then her fortunes shifted in ways she couldn't imagine.
In 1974 she won the Rome Prize, a fellowship then worth about $40,000 in room, board and travel, given to gifted American artists and scholars by the American Academy in Rome. It allowed her to live for two years in Italy and provided money for travel. Visiting the ruins of Egypt would have an effect on her work for the next 15 years.
"I really woke up as an artist," Harvey recalled of those years in Rome, a city she continues to revisit. "I became part of that community of thinkers I always wanted to be part of -- smart, intense people as interested in their ideas as I was in mine."
Quantum leaps
It was during her stay in Rome that Harvey got a job offer from elite Wellesley College, an odd place for this irreverent New Yorker who as a kid got busted for roller skating in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum.
The day she signed a contract with Wellesley, she got an offer to show with New York's hip Terry Dintenfass Gallery, where she remained until the mid-1980s.
It was about the same time that she and Muhly put down roots in Vermont, buying a 1790s farmhouse that was on its last legs. The real estate agent told them it would have to come down, but it still stands, with caved-in fireplace and rotten sills. She and Muhly dug a pond and built a barebones studio looking out on a range of rolling hills that often crop up in her paintings.
Only in the last decade or so has Harvey painted such familiar surroundings, though. For years she tried to capture such elusive images as the laws of quantum physics and the way we think. Some observers found that pretentious; she came to feel that the rest of the world just didn't care about such arcane subjects. So she turned to the landscape, to the Vermont woods and to worlds seen in her travels and gleaned from books.
Although her recent work is less concerned with cosmic musings, Harvey still flirts with the metaphysical. The twisting patterns of an ancient Tibetan labyrinth are carved into a meadow; the dreams of a brook trout have been woven into the eddies of a mountain stream.
Ed Koren, the New Yorker cartoonist who lives about 20 minutes from Harvey in Vermont, said it's this blend of the familiar and the far-out that makes Harvey's work so original.
"It's a wonder to me that she can take something that is so familiar, and find something fresh and unique in that view. There's a spirituality in her paintings, a search for something."
Following her own muse
For all her admirers, Harvey has worked largely in the shadows of the art world.
"She's a painter's painter," said Jennifer Brown, head of contemporary art at Harvey's New York Gallery, Berry-Hill. "Her work is so much about this painterly vision that in terms of contemporary art is outdated."
While Harvey may not be the darling of the New York art scene, said Brown, she appeals to serious collectors.
"You can't tuck her work away," said Brown, once a student of Harvey's at Wellesley. "It has a strong intellectual appeal to people who want to be engaged with what they put on their walls."
It's hard to say where Harvey would be today had she settled in New York and not chosen Providence as a base from which to teach, paint and raise a family. Building a career is as much about schmoozing as talent, and Harvey admits she doesn't hang out with critics, doesn't know the in-crowd.
She had a show last year at Berry-Hill and one in China, but remains for the most part unheralded.
Her last show in Rhode Island was eight years ago at the RISD Museum. More than likely, though, that has to do with the fact that she's under contract with Berry-Hill, which gets most of the commission when other galleries sell her work.
"I've gotten used to it," Harvey said of being out of the loop. "I like being anonymous."
Celebrating the process
For all her anonymity, Harvey seems more passionate than ever about painting. A studio storage room is crammed with large canvases. Berry-Hill probably has 500 paintings and drawings in its inventory.
But it's not the numbers that count, but the making that matters.
"I tell my students we don't need any more stuff in the world. God knows, I don't need another painting. It's the process I'm obsessed with.
"It's about a willingness to learn, to be wrong, to be open to change. It's okay to not know how to say it, to not even have the technical ability, just to feel game."
Bunny Harvey's paintings are at the Wheeler Gallery, 228 Angell St., through April 26. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday noon to 5, Sunday 3 to 5. Call 421-9230.
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