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Pat Harris was born in Dublin in 1953 where he spent a year as an evening student at the National College of Art and Design, before pursuing a full time painting course there from 1973 to 1978. He was awarded a scholarship at the College and, subsequently, a number of Belgian Ministry of Education and Dutch Culture Scholarships, which gave him the opportunity of studying at the National Higher Institute of Fine Arts, Antwerp, where he graduated in 1981.
His paintings, whether it be his small still-life's of a single object, a pumpkin, a pear, a lemon or wilting flowers, or landscapes made in the polders of Tielrode, where he lives, or in the boglands of Mayo in the west of Ireland, all exude a certain quiet beauty. A stillness and Rothko like glow that is achieved by slowly building up his paintings in thin often transparent layers of oil paint. Harris considers himself a translator; he translates the world around him into marks. And it is the marks he makes by both applying and removing the paint or, in his drawings, the charcoal, that remain to tell the story. A story of transience but also continuance, of fragile objects and places that obliquely persist, captured in the fragile surface of his marks.
Pat Harris has exhibited widely in Europe with solo shows at Taylor Galleries Dublin, De Zwarte Panter, Antwerp and S65 Aalst, Belgium, He lives in Tielrode, Belgium and teaches painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.
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