Campbell Works is delighted to present a new survey of works by Rod Harman. This exhibition spans his long career stretching back six decades, including paintings made while studying at the Royal College of Art. It will be an opportunity to explore some of the recurring themes and interests that vociferously resurface in Harman’s work.

Rod Harman was born in Chang-Chow, south east China in the early 1940’s only returning to the UK aged 8. His lifelong fascination with philosophy, poetry and painting starts with this early experience immersed in local Chinese culture where he was taught kindness and the local language, a language with similar structural possibilities as the poetics of painting itself.

By his own account Rod is ‘a man of God’, but many know him as a friend, tutor and mentor, having taught at Hastings College of Art for several decades. Rod is above all a ‘spiritual’ man, for whom the daily act of painting begins with the first rays of daylight through the studio glass.

We enter the Kingdom of Looking. Creation takes place in FRONT of our eyes.

I want to praise and highlight all those who have helped me towards art. Two minds are better than one. This is Civilization. ‘Let there be light’ is creation.

Rod Harman

Anyone that knows Rod, or has had the pleasure of his company is struck by his un-bridled passion and enthusiasm for art that he so viscerally exudes, exuding as a scent does from petals, or the suns heat from solid rock. Rod’s paintings, (mostly large water colours straight from the tube) are a celebration and affirmation of the force of life, waymarkers on a shamanic journey, an enquiry that has taken him around the globe in the company of ‘his guides’ Michelangelo, Cezanne, Constable, Wittgenstein, Basho and Baudelaire, to name but a few.

We grow as ADULTS.  We are as a HALF – incomplete.  By ‘Pubifying’ we are complete.

William Blake’s SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE are this. Water becomes water.  Even water joins together.

This is the WORLD OF ‘PLOP’.

Rod Harman

 

There is free on street parking around the gallery (spaces allowing), otherwise there is parking available at Morrisons supermarket on Stamford Hill, five mins walk from the gallery.

This Exhibition has been organized in partnership and with the invaluable support of:  the blackShed gallery. www.theblackshedgallery.org.uk

A FEW NOTES TOWARDS ‘PLOP’

FORWARD

We are each other.  Body to body.  What follows only amounts to this.  I often think I am not here, to hear.  Words are a sort of opaque water that leaks into itself.  We leak into each other and paint is breathed into like mud originally was (for the creation).  To be explicitly CONFUSED, I must UNSKIN thought.  So Greece, India, an aboriginal tribe have ART, the same as the nose on their faces.  The Trojan war was a vendetta fought over a vagina.  We need to accommodate each other.  Sex as a heading in its own right is between the sheets.  It is an ENTRANCE HOME TO BE entered, it is user friendly.

ART

I want to praise and highlight all those who have helped me towards art.  Two minds are better than one.  This is civilisation.  ‘Let there be light’ is creation.

We grow as ADULTS.  We are as a HALF – incomplete.  By ‘Pubifying’ we are complet

William Blake’s SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE are this. Water becomes water.  Even water joins together.

This is the WORLD OF ‘PLOP’.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (Latin for everlasting song)

It was written up out of the 1st World War – the Eastern front.  He enrolled to test his thinking.  While in ‘No Man’s Land’ he found he was not alone.  In the shadows was GOD. He wrote about God.  He discovered Limits.  After the war he taught school children.  In the same spirit he taught Cambridge Graduates and all of us.

MICHELANGELO

For the medici tombs (DAWN & DUSK, NIGHT & DAY) he pulled himself up out of the river (see the FISH SCALES on the sculptures PLINTH).  The mind becomes fresh.  He then had a DREAM idea –  to go from the tombs to the books.  He saw a trinity of stairs.  The LAURENTIAN Library stairs. He was later to say – these stairs were his FINEST IDEA.

JOHN CONSTABLE

His birth place became his life (maybe I am dreaming this).

In 1819 he wrote to his wife: ‘Everything seems full of blossom of some kind and at every step I take, and on whatever object I turn my eyes that sublime expression of the Scriptures, “I am the resurrection and the life”, seems as if uttered near me.’

THE CREATION (Genesis)

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  Now the earth was formless and empty, Darkness was over the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the water.  And God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.

JOHN CONSTABLE

Constable made a full scale study for his painting the Haywain.  In this study he paints himself at centre stage, sitting on the back of a high horse.  The horse is drinking from his father’s mill pond.  The Boy seems to look up to heaven and ‘take in’ his FATHER’S WORLD.

WHY OH WHY IS THIS IDEA PAINTED OUT?  WHY PAINT OUT THE INCREDIBLE?

I want to ‘RESURFACE’ CONSTABLE, bring him up out of the WATER, ‘UNPLOP’ him.

Later in life he paints SALISBURY CATHEDRAL viewed from the meadows.  (THIS REQUIRES YOUR IMAGINATION).  He ‘PINT SIZES’ the Cathedral so it fits neatly into the back of a Haywain drawn by mystical and mythical horses.  They go under the water (the sun and the sea) for the night.  The CATHEDRAL IS PLOPPED.

The next day (TOMORROW) it is bone DRY and fit for all holy services.

MICHELANGEO

One foot is on the Library steps.  Art is TOUCHED ON. We feel for the next step. CARVING IS FEELING ‘FOR’.

WITTGENSTEIN

‘One can say that MEANING drops out of language’.  (Philosophical grammar).

MATSUO BASHO

We travel underwater (PLOP) AS A Frog or as a cloud of meaning travels on when we are dead.

‘Sick on a Journey

OVER PARCHED FIELDS

DREAMS WANDER ON’ (Basho’s death HAIKU)

JOHN CONSTABLE

He studied clouds in their own right – overhead.  He dated each study.

FRANÇOIS VILLON (Poet)

‘GATE AND ENTRANCE UNTO PEACE’

‘O grace and pity so immense

gate and entrance unto peace,

essence of benignest mercy

which endures and takes away

our faults, if I abstain from praise

I say that I am then ungrateful,

and so I’m brought to this refrain:

one must speak well of good.’

 

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (from the poem EN PASSANTE)

Our Eyes Cross.  We CONSUMATE AT A ROAD JUNCTION.  We enter ETERNITY by bumping into each other.

DOSTOEVSKY AND DÓGEN

IN THE ‘Brothers Karamazov’ DMITRI sleeps through his sentence. This ‘sleep’ is induced by someone, kindly, putting a pillow under this head. (E.M.Forster)

He awakes from a significant dream.  A life changing dream (see Sam Foster’s – ‘Aspects of this Novel)’.

“GENTLEMEN, I HAVE had a good dream”.  ‘WHO, put the pillow under my head’.

Dógen.

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. (Book XXIX)

The Mountains and Rivers Sutra.

In the hour of the rat [12-2 A.M.],

eighteenth day, tenth month of the

first year of Ninji [November 3,1240],

at Kannon Dōri Kōshō Hōrinji.

 

Dógen dated as Constable did his clouds.

• He precisely dates his writing – as does Constable for EACH CLOUD.
• Mountains and water WALK. They have a life of their own.
• In Dógen’s writings, the ‘TANGLE CUTTING WORDS’ are free.

Cézanne

Makes MIND ALTERING ART, e.g. the ‘BARNES BATHERS’ or ‘PAINTINGS OF MT. ST. VICTOIRE’.

He sits and the mountain walks to his hand.

SEX – it’s JUBILATION.  We are arm and arm, and hand in hand, inside each other.  As INDIVIDUALS we are a HALF.  FOR CREATION to be – we need to mix.  We are born warm.  Risks need to be taken.

YOU HAVE ONLY TO LISTEN TO THE ‘MORNING CHORUS’.  Birds sing songs for each other.

SIMONE WEIL

‘Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes.

Instants when everything stands still, instants of contemplation,

of pure intuition, of mental void, of acceptance of the moral void,

it is through such instants that he is capable of the supernatural.

Whoever endures a moment of the void either receives the

supernatural bread or falls.  It is a terrible risk, but one that must

be run – even during the instant when hope fails.  But we must not

throw ourselves into it.’

SIMONE WEIL

 

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (taken from A UNE PASSANTE)

‘A flash of lightning – then darkness.  O fleeting beauty, whose

glance brought me suddenly to life again in a second birth, shall I

never see you again, except in eternity?  Elsewhere, far away from

here – too late, or perhaps never?  For whither you flee I know not;

nor do you know whither I am bound – O you whom I could have

loved, O you who knew it!’

FOR THIS EXHIBITION

Nothing can be staged unless (if my memory again serves me) ‘GHOSTS walk up and down DRURY LANE’ (taken from William Hallitt’s ‘A mid summer nights dream’) – HIS INSPIRED CRITICISM.

Ghosts are largely white.  Michelangelo’s Pieta Rondanini is carved out of white.  The ‘three’ ways (TRINITY) of the Laurentian Library stairs are CURVED ends of white marble.

THEREFORE, I LAUNCH into white, with colours.

JEAN GENET AND SHAKESPEARE

We are all under the trees in JORDAN.  We side with the Palestinians.  We all act our PART (Become ‘mechanicals’).

So that the ‘MID SUMMER NIGHT’ CAN COME TRUE.  Some dreams are true.

Jean Genet wrote ‘FOUR HOURS IN SHATILA’.

In my opinion God asks Genet to ‘lip read’ the DEAD.  GOD asks him to slip into the massacre of the Palestinians (under the cover of ‘Press’).

HE MAKES THE DEAD BLUSH (again).

The living and the dead join forces on stage.  Genet goes on to write ‘PRISONER OF LOVE’.

MICHELANGELO

The three ways of the Laurentian Library stairs are the INWARD movement that fashions and carves the Pieta Rondanini

• before it is SET IN STONE.

There is a Proxy’ about great art.

Michelangelo searches for FAITH in STONE he takes from CHRIST his ORIGINAL RIGHT ARM.

In effect, the stone the ‘builders rejected’ becomes the ARM (MATURE) of the Pieta Rondanini.

By ‘Proxy’, the Arm becomes GOD.

Is art ‘PROXY’?

Cézanne

I need to talk about the influence his great painting – the BARNES BATHERS (I’ve seen it once in the flesh) has had on me.

The ‘SHE’ of the giantess is at first a ‘HE’.

As a ‘HE’, ‘HE’ STANDS ON THE VERY FOREGROUND OF THE PAINTING (a photo EXISTS).

Then the EXTRAORDINARY takes place

‘HE’ becomes a ‘SHE’.  ‘SHE’ goes back into the painting.  A semi circle, then STOPS and WALKS ON THE SPOT.

We enter the Kingdom of Looking.

Creation takes place in FRONT of our eyes.

By ‘mixing’ we are never the same again.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

Again I say (if my memory serves me)

ART can only be staged if GHOSTS walk up and down DRURY LANE.

ART has to FIND A ‘STAGE‘ for an exhibition to have a chance.

JOHN CONSTABLE

The early sketchbooks of 1814 contain a church tower (Stafford Church) dwarfed by a bonneted woman.  She towers alongside the tower.

Somehow, later in life, that Salisbury Cathedral is to go ‘PLOP’ (looms up as a fact in this sketchbook).

Constable goes into water.  Becomes UMBILICAL.  Lives under water.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

‘Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.’

Under the trees with the waters of the JORDAN as background. ART CAN STAGE ITSELF

As is ‘HERE and NOW’ in this room.

 

Texts: Rod Harman 2023