Steven Harvey
"Finn’s Raft"
"I savor solitude, especially when I find myself enveloped by the great, vast landscape of this country.
To walk alone in the desert allows me to consider what instinctively emerges in the silence. Preconceived ideals are challenged and the arrogant desire to label all things becomes superfluous. It is here that my dialogue with abstract imagery is heightened and I am left to question, how does one paint this experience of nature?
Because painting, to me, is an adventurous and intuitive practice, using paint as an illusory device to form recognisable imagery seems to be a contradiction, which serves only to distract my sense of process.
Rigorously I investigate the sculptural qualities of oil paint. Pigment is sanded and ground into the bedrock of accumulated surfaces where reservoirs of colour shift and evolve. The composition reveals itself when a persistent form claims the final space.
With the double painting constructions, back-to-back paintings fold into one condensing my experience of open space into a freestanding entity, where colour and form reposition with each viewpoint. A visual play can be entered into in much the same way we take pleasure in absorbing an immense landscape that encompasses our peripheral vision. It is here that I ask the viewer to imagine or determine the boundaries of form.
The result of this particular layering process is that the paintings redefine themselves as objects. And, for me, the object moves closer to the curiously beautiful, yet uncompromising essence of nature."
Steven Harvey, 2008
Harvey undertook a Bachelor of Art in Education at the City Art Institute in Sydney in 1986 and completed a Post Graduate Diploma in 1989 before graduating in 1994 with a Masters of Art in Painting from University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts. From 1993 to 1999 he exhibited work in solo and group exhibitions at the Coventry Gallery, Sydney and in recent years has held bi-annual solo exhibitions with Martin Browne Fine Art in Sydney and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne. In 1996 Harvey took part into the Artist in Residence program at Arthur Boyd’s Bundanon Trust Studio and during 1998, he was selected as the Inaugural Artist in Residence for the University of New South Wales. He has participated in a number of key touring and invitational exhibitions, including Painting 2002 at the S.H. Ervin National Trust Gallery, Sydney and A Tribute to Western Australia at the Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth in 2003. Steven Harvey is represented in public and private collections including The University of New South Wales, Tamworth Regional Gallery, Macquarie Bank, Art Bank, and private collections in America, England, Australia and New Zealand. Steven Harvey lives and works in Sydney.