About the artist:
George Harkins, educated at the Philadelphia College of Art and at the University of Arizona, is by any measure an American master. His first solo exhibition was in New York, at the Shelburne Gallery, in 1975. Since then his work has been exhibited in more than 75 solo and group shows, and has been selected into dozens of private and museum collections. Harkins and his work have been written about in many newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Arts Magazine, Art/World, and the American Artist. He is renown for his landscapes and for his increasing interest in the relationship between man and nature.
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You're following the deer trail winding in half-light through the underbrush. Tiny insects float vaguely in front of you. You can hear the hammering of a woodpecker. Coming up on a bluff, you see for the first time the flat silver of water shelved in streambeds. Whole skyscapes-pillars of clouds in the sky, the undersides of trees-float slowly downstream, then roll over stones to explode in a spillway, where everything comes alive.
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George Harkins has been there. He knows this water. Back when he had a bout with cancer, Harkins's work very obviously became autobiographical. Producing images of wintering trees, he evoked the chill and isolation of life under siege: stark, denuded limbs; overlaid, disoriented branches; the detritus of a whole season sinking among the ruin. Now that he has survived, Harkins's work is no less autobiographical, but much more profound.
In Silver Cascade, 2004, Cascade With Gold, 2005, and Streamlight Patterns, 2006, Harkins focuses on those junctures in a stream where flat water breaks over stone and courses into a roiling pool. The images are colorful, rendered from very nearly every color and variance of color in the spectrum. They are layered: stones glow with earthen iridescence below the tension of water pulled over their round surfaces. They are masterfully composed: working at the outermost edge of himself, Harkins's currents, eddies, and torsions are eerily fantastic, as in Silver Cascade, or remarkably comforting, as in Cascade With Gold.
It's the latter of these images in which Harkins is most triumphant. Obviously interested in the particularity of elemental life, in Cascade With Gold, Harkins catches the shape, movement, and color of real water. The viewer lucky enough to find his or her way off the interstate for a respite before this image can't help but to become distracted, can't help but to wonder and stare at the water, thinking how gentle its course must be, how slippery are its time-worn stones, how beautiful is nature's flow and interlocked perfection. This is the water out of which all things have come and into which all this must eventually pass. Looking at this water, one comes to understand the economy of nature, how all things needed to have come together exactly as they have in order to have created this image, this moment, our earth. Move a single pebble, tear a single root, and everything would have been irrevocably altered. Cascade With Gold is a metaphor or, better yet, a kind of hieroglyph for the larger eco-system out of which we have come. Learning to live within that system seems to be our challenge now. Cascade With Gold reminds us that in order for man to live successfully within this beautiful natural world, we are to develop new moral, philosophical, economic, political, and biological imperatives. We are to perform a unification whereby the me and the not me are made divine.
In Nature, Emerson raises the virtue of living life within the "currents of the Universal Being" where "all mean egotism vanishes." In his most recent work, it is Harkins who vanishes-into the miraculous unification of the me and the not me. This newest work speaks of release and acknowledgment-release from all fear and pain, and acknowledgment that death-because it is intrinsic to life-is beautiful.
John A. Haslem, Jr., PhD.
