Artist: Norrie Harman

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There is an undeniable rawness about Norrie Harman’s work. The work is dark and brooding, jagged and sometimes representational. Images are often left in an unfinished state; surfaces are scratched and streaked giving them a sense of freshness and urgency. And thematically, Harman is not interested in niceties either. Like Francis Bacon, or German expressionists such as Max Beckmann and the quieter Kath Kollwitz, he brings grotesqueness to his work that makes it powerfully haunting, mysterious and accentuates the rawness of his technique. He is interested in displacement, people on the edge of society, the fringes, outcasts. He paints discarded places and discarded people. It is likely that the urge to confront this subject matter comes from a childhood spent growing up on a scheme at the outskirts of Edinburgh. ‘I get fed up of the way that people think of Edinburgh as this genteel middle class city, but all these things are there, at the edges, on the fringes. Strip joints, estates’, he says. So he paints blocks of flats, a Polish stripper, a female addict with the bandaged stump of a recently amputated hand. Indirectly, then, Harman’s work is also about social constructs, and barriers; the literal natural or manmade boundaries that exist between poor and affluent areas of Edinburgh, for example, but any city, and also social and racial barriers. And just as Harman’s human subjects are rejected outsiders, he also often paints stray dogs and greyhounds. You use to see them around, on the street, this sort of dog. They always have the same look in their eyes. That look is vulnerability, a quality that characterizes much of Harman’s work. For all its rawness and edginess, there is also a sense of fragility, which adds to its complexity. Harman’s portraits are beautifully executed: he combines a great talent for draughtsmanship with personal narrative. His cityscapes, though, are unpeopled places, dark, punchy and bleak. Says Harman, I find tranquility in them. Elsewhere, in his work, there are paintings of burnt out 4x4s and caravans. In ‘Caravan Abandoned’ Harman depicts an array of chairs outside the caravan, making it look as if everyone had just left and leaving the viewer wondering why. The idea of the caravan as a narrative symbol, a leitmotiv within his work is a fascinating one to Harman, The caravan is a symbol of people in transit. ..I have both good and bad memories associated with caravans, he says, like going to the seaside with my family in the summertime, but also the perverts who lived in caravans on the estate. Rarely using brushes, Harman instead prefers to apply paint with bits of card or CD cases, sculpting into it and letting it dry before applying again.. This makes the process as raw as the subject matter, and makes Harman able to work with his surface in a more personal and direct way. Similarly, he will paint on found pieces of cardboard, enjoying the battered and raw quality of the surface. Harman’s work portrays an evident joy and instinctiveness for mark making. While Harman’s work is in many ways subversive, it is however firmly grounded in skilled traditional craftsmanship. Harman is proud of his Scottish artistic heritage, and is aware that his training at Edinburgh school of Art taught him the same core skills that Scottish artists before him have learned, which he says allowed him to lay the foundations of his practise with a traditionalist edge. While I was at college, I spent a lot of time in the Life Room, drawing form, drawing from life. This has, says Harman, left him with the ability to look at a figure, establish it and reduce it. He feels confident with his ability to do this, and then to edit the form, too. Which means that amongst other things, Harman is a highly talented portrait artist. The work in this exhibition shows a selection of darker, moodier portraits. I’m delighted to be taking part in this show, particularly exhibiting with David Hosie and Joyce Gunn Cairns, both of whom I’ve tremendous respect for. David was my main tutor at Edinburgh and without blowing smoke up his arse I remember walking into the lecture theatre for the first time and seeing this gargantuan painting on the back wall and going ‘fuck me that’s impressive’. I spent the rest of the lecture and subsequent lectures cranking my neck back to see it every time’. That painting set precedence.

J Gaunt.

CV