Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Henrietta Harris

New Zealand-based artist and illustrator artist Henrietta Harris is known for her incredibly beautiful and often distorted portraits.She works with working with paper, pen, oil, watercolor, gouache, acrylic, and sometimes gold leaf to produce incredible works of arts that are a fascinating mix of naturalistic, surrealistic and post-impressionist technic and substance.
Her watercolor paintings often involve portraiture with a departure into the surreal, with faces skillfully obscured and misplaced by the clean sweep of a brushstroke.She often depicts individuals at the crossroads of early adulthood, in states of uncertainty or isolation — self-scrutinizing and scrutinized by others.The artist’s earliest works were executed on paper and tended to disrupt the usual access point to emotion — the face. She made pen drawings of people with visages barren of features but surrounded by lyrical waves of hair.Using watercolor, she played with faces in other ways, multiplying them or stretching them like taffy, such that they were differently enigmatic, or differently expressive.Moving into oils, Harris began to experiment with more traditional modes of portraiture, creating immaculately rendered paintings in which brush-marks were all but eliminated.

More of Henrietta Harris’ surrealist paintings can be found at https://henriettaharris.com/.