PAUL HARMON: The Passionate Life

“Go to the other side of the mountain,” Paul Harmon advises.

In his studio, at his historic 1793 farmhouse in Brentwood, Tennessee, surrounded by hundreds of his paintings, Harmon begins our afternoon with a story.  A long time ago, when he was visiting the Sewanee/Monteagle Mountain area, he happened to strike up a conversation with a priest.

The priest told him that the phosphate company that had supported the local economy had moved out decades ago, but, incredibly, a significant population of the workers were still there and still bitter about losing their jobs.  The irony was that there were jobs on the other side of the mountain.  But change takes courage.  And so, they stayed, lamenting their lot in life.  ”Go to the other side of the mountain” became a lifelong theme Harmon has embraced with relentless passion.

“Life is just too short not to do what you love.  I’ve got the best job in the world.  It was the same job I had in kindergarten.  Now, I just have better materials,” Harmon laughs.

He credits his family for giving him the foundation to unabashedly pursue his ambitions.  His grandmother Adelaide, also a successful artist, founded the Nashville Artists Guild and was its first President.  His sister is a poet, “a brilliant one”, according to Harmon.   His father “would have been a fine artist…but when he was in his early 20’s, he already had two little children…but the experience he had encouraged my sister and me to follow the dream.  I never felt I had to do some job that I didn’t like in order to make a living.  I’ve always felt strong about my responsibilities, but I never felt like the solution to that was to do something that I didn’t enjoy.”

Doing what makes him happy has served him well, bringing him great personal and professional success.  ”Silly in love” with his wife, Karen Roark, Harmon is adored by family, friends, and legions of fans.  His career speaks for itself.  Harmon’s work hangs in major collections, galleries, and museums all around the world.

Among international honors too numerous to name, Harmon was chosen by the city of Caen, France for the official one-man exhibition at the D-Day 50th anniversary remembrances, and by Medellin, Colombia to represent the United States in the Bienal De Arte celebration.  In 1995, President George Bush commissioned him to create the artwork for the label on their custom champagne bottles to celebrate his and Mrs. Bush’s 50th anniversary.  The original paintings now hang in the same presidential library.  Equally locally celebrated, Harmon designed the work “Seven Muses of Music,” which was etched into granite panels on the Bell Tower above Tennessee’s Bicentennial Mall on Capitol Hill.

With so many awe-inspiring works splayed before my eyes, touring his studio is a stupifyingly surreal experience.  As we begin the photo shoot, Harmon sets his non-alcoholic beer precariously on top a stack of original oils leaning against a wall.  Monique, the photographer, squeals and quickly moves it out of harm’s way.  Harmon shrugs, proving that he might be a master, but he is still a man.

In the early 80’s, already a well-known artist, Harmon concluded that the other side of the mountain was on the other side of the ocean.   He relocated to Paris to “change surroundings in order to change the work.”  Distrusting his own impetus to “just decide to be different,” he “lets the environment filter through to move and progress the work by osmosis.”

He tells us he chose Paris because his heros…Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Chagall, Degas, Braque among them…had lived there and he wanted to “walk the streets they did, to see the things they saw.”

He planned to stay a year, but Paris seduced him into eleven.  After 42 trips across the Atlantic began to take its toll, Harmon finally came back home to Nashville.

As a way to say good-bye to the city he loved, Harmon collaborated with friend and photographer Jean-Louis Bloch-Laine and published the book of poetry “Dantes Stones.”

The grey peach Paris dawn.
Some kind of truth exists
in this early morning air above ground.
Usable stuff.
Universal and timeless.
Walking in Abelard’s skin.
Seeing with Baudelaire’s eyes.
Borrowing Proust’s nose for a while.
Or Sartre’s ears.
Stealing the joys and tragedies
of the human race
and taking them home.

When asked if he missed the city of light, he responds, “I”ll always have Paris.”

After being single for nearly forty years, he had no intentions to ever surrender his bachelor status.  He had been married, successfully raised 2 children, and was simply enjoying his life…until he met Karen.  Falling head over heels, he married her in 2005 and is now living his happily-ever-after.

He says one of his favorite pastimes is to just sit across the room and look at her.  Or at the painting of her that hangs in the center of his studio.

When asked, “What do you find most beautiful about a woman?”

Harmon responds, “Everything. Women are perfect.”

He talks of plans to whisk his bride away to Barcelona or Venice to relive with her the excitement of his younger days in the cafes…if only he could figure out what to do with their border collie.

When not enjoying his wife’s company, Harmon works into the wee hours of morning.  Painting at night gives him the freedom from the distractions of the day.   “I’ve always been a night person.  My sister and my father were morning people.  They were always too happy in the morning and would do awful things like whistle.  But their IQ’s would drop noticeably by 9 pm when my mother and I would just get going.”

Harmon always begins with a drawing.  To him, drawing and painting are completely different beasts.   “Drawing is an intellectual process.  It’s a process of ideas and a process where you must be pragmatic.   There’s purpose and logic.  Painting to me is not so intellectual.  It’s a rhythm of not thinking too much.”

“In my studio, I crank up the ipod and just paint.  You can tell when you get into the groove.  This is why I paint at night.  If I paint during the day, the phone can ring…and then it will take me a long time to get back to that place – that special place, the poet’s place, the child’s place.”  Harmon’s worst fear is that “you never know if the Muse is going to leave…or that the Muse will hit and a brush won’t be in my hand!”  So, he works nearly every day.   Interesting to note, he also paints flat – without an easel.

Whether creating classic landscapes, still life, or reclining nudes, Harmon’s work remains distinctive by strong, often stenciled, bold lines.  A critic in Paris once said you can recognize a Paul Harmon from a thousand meters in a speeding car.  Another proclaimed that “the line gives the canvas perspective and depth…the drawing’s precision pulls one into a powerful intimacy.”

In the 80’s, he began to use an actual stencil to define the line work.   Comparing early paintings to his later pieces, he exclaims, “Look at these [early paintings]…it’s someone searching for a stencil!”

Harmon, curiously pragmatic for an artist, once shocked business leaders in an address at Fisk University.

He spoke to the audience, “I’m sure you’ve been hearing a lot about how you have an obligation to support the arts.  I don’t think you do.  I have chosen to be an artist because that is my natural bent and because I have chosen to be an artist, it is not your obligation to buy my work.   I don’t think the federal government, the state, or the city has any obligation to art.”

“What I do feel is important is that you see my work, or other artists work, and something inside of you changes.  You’re a doctor, a lawyer, a cab driver, or a dentist and something in you changes because art speaks to human beings and you recognize that feeling within you as a good thing.  Then, you want your family, your friends, your community to have that same feeling.   That’s the way museums are built.  That’s how galleries are supported.  Not through any sort of guilt, but because of what happens inside of you.”

Artists often ask Harmon what they should paint so that it sells.  Harmon derives four ultimate outcomes from that scenario.

“If you paint something to sell that you don’t like and it doesn’t sell, you’re stuck with a painting you don’t like.  Even worse, if it does sell, you have to keep painting that way.  If you paint with your heart and it doesn’t sell, you will still have art that means something to you.  And if it does sell, you can keep painting that way.”

His advice to aspiring artists: think internationally.   “Painting beyond your community keeps you from worrying about what Aunt Nancy will think,” Harmon counsels.

Local restauranteur, Randy Rayburn, has acquired one of the largest private collections of Paul Harmon’s art.  At the Sunset Grill, Rayburn’s restaurant in Hillsboro Village, hangs a piece from one of Harmon’s most celebrated series The Walking Man.  Princess Caroline of Monaco also chose The Walking Man for her private collection.

In a speech to his alma mater, Montgomery Bell Academy, Harmon dissects this famous series.

“I have attempted, in a universal way, to capture the curiosity and the fortitude of mankind through an iconic walking figure.   One that can take us into locales, experiences and, more importantly, ideas.   The walking figure is a symbol for the core spirit of what it is like to be human.”

Harmon once worked with his friend, Beth Vann Griggs, on a series of watercolors and oils on canvas where she was the model.  Beth also happened to be a NASA science project specialist.

In 2003, before launching into space, Beth asked the entire crew of the ill-fated Columbia STS 107 to sign an original painting on paper that Harmon did of the American bald eagle.   As the ground communication liaison, Beth stayed behind while her comrades rocketed into the annals of history.

At night, as he painted, Harmon turned on NASA-TV and listened to Beth talk experiment procedures with the crew.  That was the mission where they were all killed during re-entry.

Harmon took the original art they signed and made only 9 prints, enough to send to the crew’s family members, and to Beth.

Harmon recently began work on a comprehensive book of his art from 1961 to date.

More than anything, the experience has shown Harmon that over the years, his style has evolved not “by jagging from the left to the right but more like a smooth arc.”  Harmon says he can still relate the painting he was working on last night to those of his earliest days.

“My work is a personal journey of my life.  It is therefore both serious and frivolous.  Joyous and melancholic.  Spiritual and erotic.  The continuity is in the fact that it tracks a real life.”

Harmon lives his life as passionately as his work implies.  Freedom rings throughout his soul and through his art, he gives us permission to feel the same way.

“I believe that my paintings are to be finished by the viewer.  I paint the work and it contains my feelings and interests and viewpoints…but it is up to the viewer to bring their own life to what the painting wishes to say…then, the painting takes on new life.”

As I concluded the interview and we said our good-byes, I realized that it was true.   Art changes you.

Leaving Harmon’s historic studio retreat, I emerged a different, better person.

by Olivia Sarratt McCarthy

You can find Harmon’s art at the Zeitgeist Gallery at 1819 21st Avenue South.

www.paulharmon.com