ABOUT RICHARD C. HARRINGTON

Richard C. Harrington has been a professional artist for over 30 years and has placed over 900 paintings in private collections in North America and Europe.

For me, barns are monuments to people like my aunts and uncles, people whose lives and labors were forever tied to a place, men and women who greeted the day the same way they did their nephew, with smothering hugs, bone crushing handshakes, and enthusiasm for the life at hand.

At family picnics, they’d stand together in a quiet group, their slow-talking stories bringing chuckles and snorts amongst themselves. To my young eyes, they always seemed like stern, but friendly giants, fingers like sausages, leather-hard hands and corded arms. I was surprised once I reached adulthood to find they didn’t tower over me, though they’d still make me wince at a handshake, their eyes sparkling. My grandma’s little brothers, they were ranchers and lumbermen, and a carpenter in-law, in eastern Oregon.

My aunts' smothering hugs made the uncles’ handshakes seem gentle. Eyes twinkling, they were always moving, putting together meals, or some other chore, while catching up with family, doing anything that needed done. My Aunt Marilyn was on horseback every chance she got, well into her 90’s.

They are what the barns are about. 

I swore I’d never paint a barn, but that was before I took Darby out to meet them, from our then home in western New York. She was welcomed and swept up in the love they offered the same way I always was. After four days, before leaving, we wandered out into the original hay barn. It’s gone now, burned as so many go, but on that day I stood there, wondering how my life had gone so wrong I wasn’t a cowboy. Darby said, "Why don’t you paint barns, they’re beautiful." I said, "Yes, but they’re kitschy as a subject." She laughed, and giving me a thump, said, "They don’t have to be."

And that’s where it began, a new body of work, trying to take a common subject and make it something new. To turn a subject of sweet nostalgia and American pie into something contemporary and iconic, representational to an extent, but imbued with the energy and surface of expressionism. They are a marker of my own evolution from the strict representational work that fascinated me in my youth, to the more contemporary influences of abstract expressionism and color field painting.

When I see a barn, it represents someone's long history with a place, their family's history, and the hard work it takes to do that work and live that life. The barns are nearly always viewed from a low angle to add to their monumentality, with landscape stripped away to focus on the structure, the symbol of labor and history.

GRANTS AND RESIDENCIES

2016 Rocky Mountain National Park Artists Residency

2001 Individual Artist Grant, Genesee Valley Council on the Arts, NYS Council for the Arts

EXHIBITS

2018 Pacific University, Ecosystems, Solo exhibition of large format landscape and abstract painting.

2014 SUNY Geneseo, Landscape Today, juried exhibition of contemporary landscape painting.

2014 Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY; Fly Fishing: A Celebration of the Stream

2013 Pearce Museum, Corsicanna, Texas, A New Look at the American West

2013 Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY. 64th Annual Rochester Finger Lakes Exhibition.
          Awarded the Harris Popular Vote for Hot Summer Sky, oil on canvas

2012 Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH, 76th Annual Butler Mid-Year Exhibit

2010 The Artifact of Landscape, February 1 – March 12, 2010 Lockhart Gallery, State University of New York at Geneseo

2006 Art in the Parks, Top 100

2005 Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY. 71st Regional Exhibition

2002 Wayne County Arts Council, Boats and the Psyche of Man
           Juror award for Earth, Salmon, Man

2002 High Falls Art Gallery, Where are the Best paintings in Rochester

2001 Schweinfurth Art Museum, Made in New York Annual Exhibit

2001 Artist Magazine, Annual Art Competition

2000 Wilson Gallery, Solo Exhibition

2000 High Falls Art Gallery, Where are the Best Paintings in Rochester

EDUCATION

1984 Apprenticeship in painting to artist Richard Beale

1982 State University of New York at Geneseo, BA Studio Art, BS Business