Everybody Knows, 2004
acrylic on paper
29.7
x 21.0
cm
signed ‘M.C. Harrison’ (lower right)
Provenance
Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
Colin & Elizabeth Laverty collection, Sydney, purchased July 2004
"Best known for his A4 watercolours the tantalising, sometimes pervy images are grafted from many different sources: tarot cards, popular photography, dreams, art history.
He says, "I try to look again at familiar things as though I¹m looking for the first time (on a good day) or the last time (on a bad day) -‹ or for the only time.
Using images of women, couples, faces or cats he taps into a network of public and private icons. In the words of writer Justin Paton, "The paintings are a diary's remainder, an almanac of all the inchoate feelings that slip through the net of autobiography."
The works are small, most of them not larger than a piece of office paper. Paton, a writer for the exhibition catalogue says, "Harrison¹s works on paper look so faint and thin-skinned that you fear for their survival". But survive they have. For the devoted collectors of his work they are small things that grow large in the mind. They are about dreaming, memory, fantasy, mysticism and double-meanings." (https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU0211/S00113/love-in-the-shadows-at-artspace.htm)
