Me, feeling strained, on May 15, 2026.
Hello. My name is a Harris Martinson. I'm a painter living and working in New York City.
In addition to my painting practice, I build wood furniture. I have an ongoing project to construct my living and working space with only handmade objects. I learned to sew curtains.
Some of these items are available for sale here.
I went to college and earned a BA in History from the University of Iowa and an MFA in painting from Miami University.
I'm interested in the variety of ways language can be used, particularly as enactments like in the case of promises, vows, and law. Naming things is very powerful.
I'm interested in how painting enacts things materially, things like my own psychic order. I'm interested in what it means to think and what it means to be a thinking thing. I'm interested how thinking happens with and without language.
I have learned that form emerges from structure. In my work I set conditions, structure color and material, and allow form to unfold before me, through me, with me, by me.
I was in a coma for three days in 1987. When I came to, the hearing from my right ear was gone. My brain and my auditory structures were infected with a disease.
Painting asks the eye, the hand, the mind, and matter join together for the task of orchestrating color and material on a vertical plane. I ask the eye, the hand, the mind, and matter to give form to what we are.
Painting is a unifying act. Unify to allow form to emerge and live in another's home. This is a blessing. I'm grateful to have this job.
Notice how your attention travels around and through a painting when you look at it. It's the artist's job to make that journey of attention meaningful, or at least something.
There's something about contemporary American life that seems to want to reduce human activity to a minimum.
Paintings are made over a period of time and then experienced all at once.
I'm looking for collectors who want works that actively orient the mind in space and time. I'm looking for galleries who want to put on exhibitions that reorganize public perception.
I've been writing a lot of emails recently. Most of them feel embarrassing in retrospect. I'll probably continue this and continue to feel embarrassed.
If you feel you have something to share with me, and don't mind risking embarrassment, send a note to studio@harrismartinson.com.