Richard Harrison

Pontone Gallery presents an evocative new collection of works on paper by British artist Richard Harrison. Since relocating from London to the raw and untamed landscapes of the Scottish Highlands, Harrison has found himself drawn ever deeper into themes of solitude, longing, and transformation. This latest body of work—urgent, tactile, and deeply resonant—marks a profound evolution in his artistic practice.

Rendered in a dynamic interplay of watercolour, gouache, ink, and acrylic—layered with the raw physicality of charcoal and oil pastel—these works are charged with an expressive immediacy. Harrison, who describes himself as a ‘Romantic Expressionist,’ immerses himself in the natural world not as an observer, but as a participant. The landscapes of the Highlands—windswept moors, dense forests, and shadowed gorges—have seeped into his psyche, shaping the forms and movements that emerge on paper. Figures drift through ambiguous spaces—suspended between presence and absence. Some are isolated, others enmeshed—bound together in quiet intensity. The vastness of nature is at once a refuge and a reckoning, a stage upon which desire, memory, and sorrow unfold.

The artist’s recent return to life drawing has only deepened this connection. Bodies take shape through lines that are restless, searching—capturing not only form but feeling. A gesture becomes a memory; a silhouette dissolves like mist. Harrison’s works capture the raw essence of solitude—the figure and the landscape bound together in a silent dialogue of longing, memory, and transformation, inextricably entwined, each mirroring the other’s fragility and power. His brushstrokes and lines, urgent and unrelenting, carve out a world where trees twist like limbs, and sorrow lingers in the air like mist over the moors. These works do not simply depict—they feel. They ache.

This exhibition is not just a collection of works on paper; it is a reckoning with the Sublime—an invitation to step into the artist’s solitude, to embrace the beauty of loss, and to find, within the vast and shifting landscapes, a reflection of our own transient selves.