ELIZABETH HARRIS
Winter Cherry
17" x 11"
Red Sofa
11" x 17"
Here and There
24” x 36”
ARTIST STATEMENT
“My drawings are intuitive responses to their subjects. The process of making therm is a kind of meditation, within which I often feel that my brush is moving/balancing between seeing, feeling, and thinking, resulting in an expressionistic calligraphy.
In Zen Buddhist thinking, for any particular piece of paper, the calligrapher has one chance to create with the brush. The brush strokes cannot be corrected. The calligrapher must concentrate and be fluid in execution; the brush composes a statement about the calligrapher at a moment in time. Hitsuzendo or "the Zen of the brush" is a Japanese practice aiming to "reveal the 'original self' through the brush." The practitioner stands, using brush and ink, usually on newspaper roll. In this way, the whole body is used to guide the brush, in contrast to writing at a table. He or she aims to clear their mind of all thought and emotion, and allow the calligraphic characters to flow through them onto the paper.
Similar to Hitsuzendo, when I work I aim to be fully in the moment. I, too, use large paper and stand at an easel rather than sit at a table. But unlike Hitsuzendo, emotions are an integral part of the process for me. Each drawing is experiential, the record of its subject through the lens of my intuition at a moment in time.”
Harris has studied and practiced art in New York City; Florence, Italy; Oxford, UK; Dessau, Germany; and Delhi, India. She currently lives in Maryland with her husband and two sons, a dog, a cat, twenty three fish, and a hive of bees. And her easel.