Artist Statement, 2006

My New Work continues my pursuit of the meanings of still life, the table as a stage, implicit narrative in some works; in others reflections replace the table-top as a metaphor for the past or another dimension. Two large paintings represent the myth of Persephone; one a winter scene with cyclamen, snow, pomegranates and a mysterious reflection of an owl, the other an extravagant spring arrangement of flowers and a mirror awaiting Persephone's return.

Notes on an Exhibition

by Harriet Shorr, NYC 2007

The sun works its way across the still-life table, marking the day and the seasons. Painting objects, ephemeral fruits and flowers, alluding unknowingly to myths and metaphors of our collective culture, for years I insisted on the unimportance of content. Through the years I painted many pomegranates- oils on canvas, monotypes, watercolors, never thinking of Persephone.

Pomegranite and Shells, 30 x 30 inches,                            Red Fan with Petals, 24 x 24 inches,

oil on canvas, 1999                                                                 oil on canvas, 1999                                        

It took a dream to wake me up - the early morning appearance in my mind's eye of Watteau’s Embarkation to Cythera. A group of paintings followed, representing Watteau’s courtiers reflected in water, or inhabiting the forms of broken figurines. I came to see that these quotations and references to Watteau's masterpiece were an acknowledgement of loss and disillusionment and an escape from my own historical moment.

Embarkation, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches, 2003

after Cythera, oil on canvas, 40 x 55, 2003

In the spring of 2005 I bought a copy of Ted Hughes' translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, thinking to find a subject in those poems of love, loss and transformation. They had inspired hundreds of European painters who peopled their canvases with gods and mortals enacting the drama. I was looking for poems whose narrative might be embodied in objects, emblems of passion on a table-top stage. I learned the details of Proserpina/ Persephone's story, which I had never known; the seven pomegranate seeds* which Pluto punished her for eating, her betrayal by the courtier Ascalaphus whom she in turn punished, turning him into an owl. I thought of cyclamen blooming in winter, the promise of spring. I set up my reflecting tray with water and live moss, positioned an artificial owl until I could see his reflection, and used a painting of Vermont birches to set the scene:

Ascaphalus, oil on canvas, 60 x 75 inches, 2006

The painting took all the winter of 2006 and then it was spring.

After my last show several painter friends encouraged me to return to a dimension that I had not used for many years, 60" x 90." This size no longer fit in the new passenger elevator; I had been making my largest paintings 55"x85.  I decided to forget about the elevator - the truckers could carry the painting

down the stairs and I started work on "Persephone's Return," a frankly rococo painting celebrating spring.

Persephone's Return, oil on canvas, 60 x 90 inches, 2006

In my Vermont studio this summer I thought I was through with Persephone.

I had packed a bundle of patterned cloth remnants tied up with a yellow ribbon that I planned to use in an overly ambitious sewing project for my new granddaughter. The bundle seemed to demand that I paint it. I set it up in several still-life compositions, and then decided that it must be painted on a moss and lichen - dotted rock in the middle of the meadow.  I used studies of the rock and moss for color: the strange deep grey of the rock which absorbed light rather than reflect it and the elusive green of the moss which vibrated with the rock. I set the bundle of cloth on the studio table. For reasons which were not clear, the attitude of this bundle of cloth made me hum "a tisket a tasket a green and yellow basket" as I painted it. When the painting was finished the title came to me: "What she Left Behind."

"Persephone was playing in that glade

With her companions

Brilliant as butterflies

They flitted hither and thither excitedly Among lilies and violets. She was heaping The fold of her dress with the flowers

Hurrying to pick more, to gather most,

Piling more than any of her friends into baskets. There the Lord of Hell suddenly saw her. In the sweep of a single glance

He fell in love

And snatched her away

Love pauses for nothing."

(Memtamorphosis, by Ovid - Ted Hughes' translation)

What She Left Behind, 32 x 52 inches, oil on canvas, 2006

I am tracing or tracking the paths of association because I think they are present for every artist although not necessary for either the artist or the audience to follow. The self-conscious process of following the path of association is the method devised by Marcel Proust in his great work "The Remembrance of Things Past." Among the various models of the brain and consciousness proposed by science I have always thought that Proust's model will one day be accepted as physiologically as well as psychologically valid.

The psyche of the artist is one in which forms become a metaphor for lived experience and within a given culture those forms may be experienced by the artist's audience as a distillation of shared experiences.

*as per Robert Graves

This is an essay written by Barry Schwabsky on the occasion of Harriet Shorr's exhibiton at Purchase College. The essay is sans footnotes.

Doesn't Harriet Shorr make the critic's job almost too easy-suspiciously easy- with her recent paintings of reflections? In these paintings the understated sense of bracing pictoral decontextualization that has long been typical of her horizonless still lifes has become overtly puzzling, because most (but not all) of what we see in them appears to be upside down, until we realize that the image is of something reflected in still water. The dominant image is not only topsy turvy, but furthermore our view of it is interrupted by the objects-typically flowers-scattered in the water. It's as though what we think of as more real(the directly rendered flowers) merely veils or camouflages the less real, the reflected image.

So the perceptual task Shorr sets the viewer is pretty complicated, but the writer looking to find the meaning in that complication has it made, thanks to the idea of reflection-an objective phenomenon that nonetheless only exists in the eye of a specifically situated observer. What other concept so neatly ties together purely optical experience with endlessly echoing philosophical resonance, formalism with what formalist criticism might have dismissed as "literary" content.

The question of formalism in painting is hardly limited to abstraction, by the way. There are distinctly formalist strains within the art's representational wing as well, and Shorr's thinking about her work has always been deeply imbued with them. For years, I recall, she always avoided discussing the narrative or metaphorical potential of her selection and disposition of still life objects, perferring to speak of them as items of purely visual interest, distinctive colors and textures viewed as surfaces whose appearance was to be transcribed onto another, the canvas. And the paintings pretty much bore out her contention, I think, that they were essentially "fields of color," as she recentely recalled it. As the otherwise very different paintings of Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz may be said to do, Shorr's paintings seemed to describe a world of consummate exteriority, one of sheer presence, without depth.

Through formalism in painting, at least this kind of formalism, is not necessarily abstract, it is tied to an essentially abstact way of seeing. So it's not surprising to hezar Shorr admit that-going back as far as her graduate student days at Yale to discover that she couldn't pull it off with conviction-she has what she calls "an ongoing fantacy that some day I'd make an abstract painting, and what will it be and what will it look like, and finally I realized, this is it."

Or was it, anyway-but not anymore. In many ways Shorr's paintings of recent vintage seem her least abstract ever. What's hard to say is whetherher increasing openness to talking about extra-visual content in term is part of the cause of that, or one of its effects. By using the device of reflections, Shorr is inescapably evoking questions about what's really real. "Sometimes I think the reflection and rhe real world are completely different," Shorr told me, "but when I look at them I see they're not ." She was talking about the reflections and the reality inside the paintings, of course, but I couldn't help but think the same wass true about the paintings as reflections of the reality outside them. Surprisingly, all the complicated artifice of Shorr's recent paintings with their theatrically manipulated set-ups hasn't taken her deeper into art for art's sake, further separating the world within the frame from the one that lives around it. Instead, by qualifying the abstract presence of pure colorwith an acknowledgment of degrees of reality-shadows, reflections-they add to the visual intensity of her previous work a complexity that has more of the texture and the ambivalence of live experience. The reality of these paintings lies in their developed qualification or erosion of the real.