Mike Fitzharris
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Mike Fitzharris "Still Life" Oil on canvas, 23½” x 23½”
“His work is grounded in landscape. The pictorial perspective is invariably aerial which creates a tunnel view that the audience enters into visually. Paint is usually scratched into the surface and lines and shapes swirl as if controlled by natural forces. The colour is often Mediterranean in hue and he favours rich yellows, orange, vibrant greens and blues. Occasionally industrial or sensitive environmental circumstances are chosen as subject matter”. (Samuel Walsh)
Michael Fitzharris was born in Limerick in 1952. He studied at the Limerick School of Art and graduated in 1973. Having completed his studies at the Limerick School of Art, Mike Fitzharris undertook post-graduate studies at Berlin’s renowned Hochschule fűr Bilden Kunst. In order to gain admittance to the college he was required to spend three days depicting the city of Potsdam in East Berlin. He completed a series of six drawings and on that basis he was accepted by this prestigious art school. He feels that the three years he spent there enabled him to free himself of the more academic approach imposed on him in Limerick Art School and to develop his own personal style of painting.
On his return to Ireland he taught art in secondary schools in both Kerry and Dublin. He now divides his time between Dublin and Marbella, Spain. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in Ireland at the Jorgensen Gallery, the Riverrun Gallery, The Oriel Gallery, Hillsboro Fine Art Gallery and the Ashford Gallery. He has also exhibited his paintings internationally in Marbella in Spain and at the Galerie Alexandre in Paris and he has represented Ireland in exhibitions in Canada, France, Slovenia, Wales, Belgium, Northern Ireland and England. He has received many awards, as an artist, such as the Royal Ulster Academy Award, the Taylor De Vere Award at the Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibition and a number of Arts Council awards.
His paintings are included in many corporate and institutional collections, throughout Ireland including those of the Office of Public Works, Guinness Mahon Bankers, the Dublin Dental Hospital, the Dublin Port & Docks Authority and Mary Immaculate College of Education in Limerick.
Extract from an interview with Mike Fitzharris:
Most of my painting is created through the stimulation of travel. I don’t necessarily make notes or sketches when travelling to record what I see but I seem to remember the specifics of a particular landscape experienced at the time. These are not photographic memories, more like; to use a much-abused word; impressions. When I return to my studio I coat the board with a remembered tone or hue of colour and reproduce the sense I have of the place I’ve seen. This could just as easily occur walking around Dublin as it could in a more exotic clime.
The movement in harbours and the transit of boats or ships in docks fascinates me. To me their movement functions very much like a line in a painting that comes into the picture and then leaves. This is not a metaphor, more like a recording of movement.
My colour choices tend towards pastel or the lighter end of the palette. I’m not completely shy of strong colour but I’m wary of how it can overpower an idea so I use pure reds, yellows and blues with care. In recent work I’m using a lot of white and I think this has to do with working in Spain where colour can be saturated out through the intense heat of the sun. Interestingly, this also creates very dark shadows!
The only drawing I do is the drawing required to control a painting. I work directly into the wet paint and the line then is not sharp but softened by the paint. Sometimes I scrape the line out of the wet paint. I like to push paint around the surface, nudging it into corners and blending the tones so a unified image is made.
There are many happy accidents in my work. Accidents help stimulate new things in the painting that I can latch onto and use to complete the picture. I have a very good idea about what I’m going to do before I start but I’m open to things happening that weren’t planned and that means every painting is interesting without exception.
Michael Fitzharris was born in Limerick in 1952. He studied at the Limerick School of Art and graduated in 1973. Having completed his studies at the Limerick School of Art, Mike Fitzharris undertook post-graduate studies at Berlin’s renowned Hochschule fűr Bilden Kunst. In order to gain admittance to the college he was required to spend three days depicting the city of Potsdam in East Berlin. He completed a series of six drawings and on that basis he was accepted by this prestigious art school. He feels that the three years he spent there enabled him to free himself of the more academic approach imposed on him in Limerick Art School and to develop his own personal style of painting.
On his return to Ireland he taught art in secondary schools in both Kerry and Dublin. He now divides his time between Dublin and Marbella, Spain. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in Ireland at the Jorgensen Gallery, the Riverrun Gallery, The Oriel Gallery, Hillsboro Fine Art Gallery and the Ashford Gallery. He has also exhibited his paintings internationally in Marbella in Spain and at the Galerie Alexandre in Paris and he has represented Ireland in exhibitions in Canada, France, Slovenia, Wales, Belgium, Northern Ireland and England. He has received many awards, as an artist, such as the Royal Ulster Academy Award, the Taylor De Vere Award at the Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibition and a number of Arts Council awards.
His paintings are included in many corporate and institutional collections, throughout Ireland including those of the Office of Public Works, Guinness Mahon Bankers, the Dublin Dental Hospital, the Dublin Port & Docks Authority and Mary Immaculate College of Education in Limerick.
Extract from an interview with Mike Fitzharris:
Most of my painting is created through the stimulation of travel. I don’t necessarily make notes or sketches when travelling to record what I see but I seem to remember the specifics of a particular landscape experienced at the time. These are not photographic memories, more like; to use a much-abused word; impressions. When I return to my studio I coat the board with a remembered tone or hue of colour and reproduce the sense I have of the place I’ve seen. This could just as easily occur walking around Dublin as it could in a more exotic clime.
The movement in harbours and the transit of boats or ships in docks fascinates me. To me their movement functions very much like a line in a painting that comes into the picture and then leaves. This is not a metaphor, more like a recording of movement.
My colour choices tend towards pastel or the lighter end of the palette. I’m not completely shy of strong colour but I’m wary of how it can overpower an idea so I use pure reds, yellows and blues with care. In recent work I’m using a lot of white and I think this has to do with working in Spain where colour can be saturated out through the intense heat of the sun. Interestingly, this also creates very dark shadows!
The only drawing I do is the drawing required to control a painting. I work directly into the wet paint and the line then is not sharp but softened by the paint. Sometimes I scrape the line out of the wet paint. I like to push paint around the surface, nudging it into corners and blending the tones so a unified image is made.
There are many happy accidents in my work. Accidents help stimulate new things in the painting that I can latch onto and use to complete the picture. I have a very good idea about what I’m going to do before I start but I’m open to things happening that weren’t planned and that means every painting is interesting without exception.