Richard Harrison: Equus

Down the ages the image of the horse rears up across a multitude of stories – of myth, folklore and fact - all abounding in equine protagonists. The horse embodies numerous different roles. At times it is a practical extension of human agency, on occasion a boon companion and often a mystical symbol of sublime nature. 

Harrison deploys a robust and muscular handling. His paint is slathered onto the canvas in thick, creamy layers, his busy brush delineates form in dynamic, graphic contours, his colour palette is variegated and highly chromatic. These pictures are typically dramatic and forceful in their composition, grabbing the viewer’s attention with their almost cinematic format.

The subjects canter, gallop, rear up, twist themselves into contortions and fight. They are active, energetic players in each scene: manes fly, nostrils dilate, limbs flail and eyes roll. Where human riders are present, they are schematic and anonymous. They seem superfluous to the main action. All is driven by the animal - its instinct, its inchoate desire for movement, its embrace of flux – of blood coursing, muscles contracting, skin tingling from contact with rushing air. 

The horse is an awe-inspiring force of nature, whether conjured up by classical myth, popular culture or literature, more specifically a ‘Pegasus,’ ‘Whistlejacket’ or ‘Shadowfax.’ Pick any from a veritable Pantheon of individual characters. They are all alluded to in these paintings. Harrison articulates man’s equine partner as something that in its essence reverts to the wild, becomes untameable and ultimately unknowable, inaccessible even to Bellerophon, the master of Pegasus. The painter stands apart, observing the beautiful athletic mechanism in all its elemental pomp, revelling in its fleeting existential vitality.