Jeffrey Harris ‘Nurses with Flowers’

Standing in the field of expressionist portraiture, Jeffrey Harris cuts a lonely figure. Few other New Zealand artists have journeyed with him as he painted deeply personal figure groupings with flat planes, expressionist texture, and even dark impasto monotones, year in, year out, often frightening the viewer with their terrible beauty. Indeed, portraiture cuts only a thin line through New Zealand Art History, where, by comparison, Australian portraiture has been fertilised increasingly by the wildly popular effervescence of the annual Archibald Prize. In painting the figure, Harris did have wingmen with his New Zealand contemporaries in Smither, Fomison and Clairmont and added a spiritual dimension through a deep regard for Albrecht Durer, Francis Bacon and the German Expressionists.

Early reviews of Harris’s work at the Mair Gallery in Christchurch in 1972 noted his interest in expressionism but questioned the purpose of his approach to line drawing in a non-anatomical way. Back then, classical drawing was taken as a shield against modernist tendencies. Of course, now we would warrant that in the process of mark-making—the movement of a line foreshortening a limb, or the heralding of a glance in the scribbled oval of an eye, or the whimsical outline of bodily form—says everything about the artist’s repertoire of beliefs and intentions. It presents a starting point for the viewer to create meaning from the painted image.

However, Harris’s use of flat planes of vibrant colour contained within his expressively drawn forms was praised from the outset. In fact, works from this period are now highly prized. Their brilliance is perfectly illustrated in the currently offered oil on board work Nurses with Flowers painted in 1973 and shown at the Peter McLeavey Gallery in Wellington in 1974. This work is generous in both scale and an infectious sense of startled joy. A team of nurses stands frontally towards the viewer, as if lined up for a celebratory group photo. Their eyes are startled, and the colour palette is pure joy. Who wants anatomically perfect painted hands and faces when a ward of nurses is suddenly fronting the viewer with bouquets of flowers?

Many of Harris’s paintings, especially from the 1970s, show figures contained within and alongside the landscape. In these works, the figure/ground relationship is fundamental to creating a narrative. If we see Nurses with Flowers as a landscape, it is an inside one, internalised even. The objects he paints beside his figures are like props for creating a story without words. In a 1981 interview with Art New Zealand, he noted:

‘If you look at any of my pictures you should learn a lot more about what is happening in the centre of visual attention by looking at what’s happening around it.’1

The grouping of six nurses fills the image, as if their source is a cropped photograph. (Any photographer who takes group portraits can attest to how difficult it is to capture grouped figures with a range of interacting stances.) On the wall behind the nurses are two Harris-like paintings: one, a very New Zealand based landscape that is sun-filled and bright; the other shows a crouching humbled figure in a pose that hints of nurturing rather than obeyance. The painting’s effusive presentation of flowers points to an Eden-like paradise. Frontally placed on an open table is a further bunch of flowers dramatized in thick expressionist paint. They lie prone before an empty vase, in contrast to the calmly sorted bunches presented by the nurses. There has been anxiety, and now unbelievable celebration. A first daughter has been born. Harris has said ‘You’ve got to live your art.’2

Clearly, his is a deeply personal art, but effectively, it is not really about him. What begins with personal events in his life then generates a reflection on how he feels in reaction—almost like reflexive research. This analysis of his feelings is then developed through the painting process. Then post-painting, Harris is no longer in the frame. It is for the viewer to observe the pain, the suffering or the joy and such terrible beauty can at times seem overwhelming. Success comes when the viewer declares: ‘I can identify with that’. Essentially, through his painting, Harris creates stencils for the viewer to take away and place over their own lives for a sense of self-awareness and emotional identity.

Peter James Smith

1 ‘A Conversation with Jeffrey Harris’, Art New Zealand (18) Summer 1981, p26
2 Ibid, p24