Carolyn Harris

born 1937 -

I am a perceptual painter, a natural painter. I rely on instinct, inspiration and my store of experiences past. The landscapes of Cape Ann, the rocky shoreline, salt marshes and wooded moraines a ciel ouvert-under the open sky-assert themselves on me. With urgency and a painter's strategy, I pay close attention to the changing elements, the rising tide, passing clouds, lengthening shadows and sinking sun.

I was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1937, growing up from the age of 10 in Raleigh, the then-diminutive capitol city I remember as the perfect place to be nurtured. Immediately upon receiving a B.F.A. in Painting in 1959 from the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, I migrated to New York. Other than five years in San Francisco, I have lived there ever since, dividing the year between New York and Gloucester throughout the nearly thirty years I spent with Nell Blaine and the years subsequent to her death in 1996.

—Carolyn Harris, In Plein View