Harry Bernard, an award-winning art director/creative director and figurative expressionist painter, has recently turned to printmaking where he explores the medium of monoprint as an extension of his exploration of "our transitory, vunerable lives." Using a variety of printmaking techniques including monotype, solar plate etching, carborundum, and chine colle, Harry's work is layered and complex in a way that complements his large-scale paintings.
His painting, Mom Returned as a Little Girl with No Hands and No Feet and Won't Eat/Was Here 3.2 won first prize in the 2011 Annual Juried Show at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, NH. Juror Katherine Hart wrote that his work was "a painting of complexity and nuance...one becomes aware of its layers and delicacy, in contrast to the disturbing power of its imagery."Harry states, "From a more narrative context my work evolves toward the exploration of privacy and intimacy juxtaposed with the public domain in which we live. The process begins with research and collection, which usually involves much walking with a camera stashed and ready. The result is a studio that resembles a museum of urban detritus. I sometimes make photographic transfers from photos I've taken, and incorporate them, along with other modes of technology and found materials, with traditional painting methods.
The impulse, I believe, arises from observation of the human predicament revealed through the disparate and often unexpected: anonymous spills, droppings, and stains on a sidewalk that hint at human and animal forms; crushed cans; lost gloves; markings in uncured concrete. Recalling primitive imagery, these random objects and images of the city serve, for my purposes, as archaeological evidence of habitation."
Image: monoprint, Hail! Hail!
