If you think studio still-life painting is "old hat", watch out for the rabbit: seeing William Harsh's strange, theatrical "still-life" pictures might trip you up. Harsh can disorient perceptions and disturb habits of seeing, making visible the "otherness" of common objects and a tangible "thingness" in the appearances of unnamable forms that announce their existences in uncertain surroundings. Cast-off items—studio detritus, tools, burdens of history, furniture, boxes, flotsam—end up welded together by bold drawing in thick, resinous oil paint to create muscular, conglomerate assemblies that feel spirited into motion as "found" in unexplained abandonment. Holding their "places"—arenas where unseen human actors may or may not return—varied arrangements improvise rudiments of "artist's studio", "bulwark" or "encampment". Everything feels made, solid though weightless, "stuff" stacked and jammed together out of any conventional context. Like driftwood piled on an "empty" beach that might conjure lovers or ship's ballast, Harsh's jerry-rigged configurations propose notions and degrees of "absence" and "occupation" as they appear to hang onto their moment of being seen, in its startling and specific immediacy. Conflicting forces, evidence of a prophetic past and remnants of some future are condensed into their circumstances. Enduring universal "presences" in scrap heaps of the lost and found? Titles of the paintings only hint at what they hold: Thirst; Odds and Ends; Red Spoils; Tradesman's Pyramid; Conch with Green Fall; Leavings.
     "People will recognize things from the world in my pictures," the painter explains, '"but I work from imagination and memory. I paint objects which are brought together in my mind." When looking at a finished canvas, Harsh wants to feel surprised as a Columbus bumping into a new continent. Anything but "still", his pictures do present primary physical encounters to the viewer. Of what, though?

     Harsh's paintings, though modest in scale, feel imposing because of their intense activity and expressionist feeling. Vivid, "artificial" color harmonies, rigorous drawing, strong design and rich, agitated surfaces provide the propelling energies that ignite orchestrated compositions. Following on early modernist experiments, Harsh prizes the fact that figurative representation is still an unsettling, dynamic event that can reveal all kinds of seeing, knowing and composing. Palpable movement is one of the most arresting characteristics of his "figurations"—motions activated by forceful drawing in blunt black lines and dense, choppy brushwork. His decisions appear to be lead by acute, fleeting kinesthetic sensations, felt when manipulating forms as they emerge on canvas. Moving viscous paint seems to push him. Anxious, restless transcriptions of worming and weaving motions animate his still-lifes and build their web-like, biomorphic armatures.
     Made stable as if on gimbals in sometimes "wreck-tangled" orders, the painter's assemblages adjust their motions to the uncertain space they inhabit, including the real terrain they push out into—now the viewer's. In such confrontation, the observer might notice his own feet shifting, "on deck, on watch", like the painter. For each picture suggests qualities of solitary mental life and feeling, of being in the world, therefore, of "sightings", excitement, agitation, apprehension, of gaining bearings in response to provisional "gatherings".
     A minimal foreground staging area—created by a drawn juncture of horizon line, sky or wall—is where the assemblies collect. Spatial ambiguities and theatric colors develop from the re-working of forms, the drawing—in and out—when the surface is thickening. Visual clues for near, far, indoors, outdoors, become confounded as the ground begins to shift between abstraction and realism, "Cubist", Byzantine, and Renaissance pictorial spaces. The spatial mix-ups generate complex visual activity and sometimes see-sawing pictorial organizations that mark this painter's still-lifes as distinctly personal and unusual. Harsh appears to gain in inventive powers by not choosing one "reality" over the next. His flexible strategies produce hybrid innovations that arouse suspense within eclectic pictures-in-progress. This translates as pictorial drama.
     Calling himself a realist, he has no interest in verisimilitude, depicting fantasy worlds or "copying nature". So, where a Surrealist might deploy imitative veils of color to suggest a day-dream's atmosphere, Harsh favors instead opaque paint and expressionist drawing, thereby to imbue his subjects with physical energies that capture what he feels most important: their physical "presences"—the "moving" sensation when mental figments born to the eye acquire sudden life, when something essential seems to overtake even talismanic appearances. This magic of representation Picasso viscerally experienced seeing African sculpture for the first time at the Trocadero in Paris; thus by his insight into the real conviction that helped those sculptures come alive, he revolutionized western painting at the beginning of the 20th century. Harsh paints by this article of faith. The mystery of making something emerge, suited only in the appearance of an extremely physical paint film, is the wonder that motivates him.
     By a sudden conviction that stirs motion of the brush, a figment once imagined "feels real" as it arises on canvas, though it remains "ungraspable". Such an image becomes its own highly conspicuous paradox. In Harsh's pictures, some of the most ambiguous elements—spatial "voids", interstices or intervals—exert such wrought shapes that the viewer might sense instead an absent void. Or, a section of what is suggested to be a "flat wall" gives the sensation of an indeterminate "distance" or "sky". These physical, perceptual puzzles exist everywhere in Harsh's pictures. Another is the colloidal paint's properties—with its thickened medium, resins and clove oil added—which allow the painter to extend a form's curious "reach" through a very slow-drying time: drawn boundaries are "violated" and blurrings occur that contradict the forms' felt solidity.
     Paint-handling is Harsh's second nature. Thus, slabs and jabs of opaque paint come to cover whole canvases with resonant skins that clearly, transparently, represent the desired arousal of multiplicitous forms—the basic erotic enchantment that haunts the entire tradition of painting and form-making, from all points of the compass through time. Uniting disparate complex elements, the continuous superficial paint film "underscores" that a final image operates as a whole organism moving to express the coherence of things as they are seen-as-felt, placed-as-alive.
     Paraphrasing Picasso, the painter instructs the image-maker in himself: "I want my pictures to feel so solid you could drive nails into them." The statement to make something feel so tangibly real that it could survive hammering, hints at the specter of destruction that impels creation and the desire for permanence. As a builder, Harsh is the hammer: whether nailing down thick marks to make a black tack, knotted stick, writhing cloth, oval mirror, braided rope, rough lumber, or armored conch shell, or, whether orchestrating odd shapes that seem hobbled as “a stubby-legged horse-like table stumbling by the sea”, the artist makes a felt, imaginative world durable.

     Though he claims not to be interested in allegory, overt symbols or explicit narrative, residues of all three can be found in Harsh's imagery. Like "memorial grounds", his inventions bear wide-ranging associations. Secrets, half-told, seem to be stashed in many of them. In several small "red paintings", entitled Red Spoils and Thirst, it's as if remnants of an Argonaut's shipwreck—rope, crates, lumber, stick, cloth—are tossed up to the viewer to be seen through an infrared filter. Perhaps the "filter" is a half-conscious figment the artist retrieved unconsciously, of the bloodied House of Atreus—like a "message" from the blurred edge of history and literature where remains of emotions still register in intense color. Perhaps the painter dreamed the opposite of "red sky at night, sailor's delight", then took up close-hued pigments of cadmium orange, dried-blood reds, violets, smoky greens and black that seared all the nominal images—even a "sky"—with curtained figments of tragic drama. He'd re-read The Iliad. A certain color chord could induce the return of buried figures to his paintings.
     When Harsh begins a picture, he has series of small map-like sketches at hand that hedge around forms which have sifted into his visual vocabulary from various sources, including reams of previous drawings, prints, books, magazines, newspapers, ordinary catalogues. These aids are put aside as soon as rudiments of figuration appear on canvas. Bright or ominous or claustrophobic, the early formations begin to exhibit a kind of psychological weather. An anxious calm pervades the first organizations: forms jostle, vying to occupy the same compacted space; they hold on, against impulses that might pull the assemblies apart. If he draws a familiar object, Harsh says it can change or be tossed out so fast he hardly knows what's happened. "Physical facts interest me. That includes the physical abstraction of the design of the whole assemblage. The fate of any one area depends on what's going on around it. If a form develops greater specificity, it's because I'm attracted to it while working on it. This can happen very rapidly—or over many painting sessions. Then suddenly it disappears, and so on— Of course, it means the whole picture is altered."

     Movements of the painter as recorded in the final picture defy gravity, leaving the observer with a feeling of physical suspension: arrays of 'wooden legs' crammed and bent into the narrow band at the bottom of several of his recent pictures stumble under beastly burdens of mass and no weight. How many times has the painter walked up to his canvas, forced by visual ideas stirred by his last move, to move the paint again? How can the viewer enter such an exhausting place?
     The eye, the key instrument of survival, wants to know what's right in front of it: is it an impenetrable stone rampart or a sand castle in the making—or something of both? Monumental and fortress-like, Harsh's arrangements seem to bar easy access, yet are curiously inviting, prickly to the eye like a moving sea urchin.
     "Whatever a picture becomes, it stands in relation to the world around it. That's its test. It has to hold its own, offering what it is to the person looking at it. It will go on saying as much or as little as it will. I don't think consciously about meaning when I'm working—I'd be bored if I drove a painting to some pre-emptive conclusion."
     Harsh won't discuss what he sees enacted in his work. "Forms come and go—the ones that stay have staying power. If I bog down or think too critically, a picture ends up feeling predictable. If I miss something, it's my fault—so rather than flay the thing, I scrape down and work with what's left, though I don't like working on top of old dry paint. I save the scraped mud and get over my disappointment. Energy comes from working. But it has to feel surprising, or why bother? Even when it's going well, it's terribly difficult. I'm rarely satisfied—which keeps me honest."

     When the painter talks about his experience, he's drawing on almost thirty years of constant studio practice and memory of what he calls utter pictorial failures. In the last ten years, he's found himself in new territory. His strong visual vocabulary and ambitious orchestrations of spatial motions in complex structures speak of that arrival. Like many painters, he is amused, often confused, by what others say of particular paintings. The process he describes, however, is sum enough of all parts for him in painting. It nourishes his passion and keeps his discipline. This experience he will not say is vanitas.
     "Sometimes the paint gets so intractable—as dumb as I feel," Harsh says squinting over his half-glasses. "Other times, it virtually gears things in motion, setting up shapes like characters with an infinite set of engagements possible among them—and I can only get at a few of them." The pressure of time is a visual reality in Harsh's work. The images incarnate all his improvisations and suggest deepest emotions about his vocation. "There's no 'there there' anymore today in painting, no context much for it to thrive in. It's been gone for a very long time now, and that sense gets into my work."
     Harsh's job as a painter appears to be to give to discarded things a renewed chance to exist: as to a dumpster diver, an ash-heap-of-history retriever, or an immigrant resettled, all of which he is.
     He professes to feelings of exile. He thinks back across years: of not knowing the place he was born, Sao Paulo; of growing up in Europe until teen years; of missing great museums; of being moved around—"living out of boxes" as he puts it—being itinerant as a student, then as a teacher in New England and San Francisco. He wonders often what his move to a small town in the North Bay Area has meant, of which he says, "it's a good place to live if you have an interior life". In his studio, he looks way beyond his personal circumstances.
     Harsh reads history and steeps himself in the traditions of his trade as if he'd been charged with responsibility by heroes long gone: among early moderns, Picasso, di Chirico and Beckmann, and going back—Goya—and to the early Renaissance, Signorelli, and closer up again, Philip Guston. Guston had been a teacher in Boston University's School of Fine Arts graduate program where he'd studied in Guston's last years, before he died in 1980. "He was tough to wrestle with, very important."
     Drawing is his primary source of inspiration. His singular power as a draftsman, developed from early childhood, has fueled his abilities to "make things happen" on canvas. Like taking notes, drawing gives him ideas and allows him to translate his knowledge of and feeling for the world as ideas occur. "Painting has got to be an adventure or it's nothing. Sometimes, starting a picture swamps me, and when that happens, I draw. Actually I'm drawing all the time—on anything. Sometimes I make monotypes. I look at a lot of other material, too, recently old prints from Diderot's Encyclopedie that show every kind of labor and mechanical device used in the 18th century. Last year, even before ' 9/11', I was looking at ancient Greek military panoply. I did probably fifty drawings for several big paintings with Hoplite shields in them. After I'd done the shield paintings, I found Robert Kaplan's new book on the pagan ethos of war and Victor Hanson's Soul of Battle. Finally, though, I have to put things away. It takes great focus to paint. It can take days, or weeks or longer to complete a painting."

      Anyone who spent a moment thinking about the instant blasting away, from the cliffs of Afghanistan, of the ancient figure of Buddha might better appreciate what it means for any artist to stand at the edge of a more than 3,500 year old "recent" Western tradition and keep working. No wonder the half-man, half-bull image of the Minotaur survives! How much of a culture's heritage is implicit in a work of contemporary art? Harsh's paintings do convey his concern to apprehend what remains of past experiences as they are held up for scrutiny in a kind of estranged present to inform an artist alone at work. Deep engagement and pleasure are felt in a culture's most memorable works of art, which inscribe vast histories of experiences of all those working in the craft through time. That history is the artist's special protection in the world, his comfort, his armor, his spur, and what steels him as he proceeds. But for a painter at work, his completed canvases simply present conditions for a new set of ideas, forms and problems. The next painting begins out of seemingly mundane facts: "I have to mix huge batches of colors. I use so much paint and have to be prepared." In the end, for William Harsh it is mixing oil paint—perhaps the "lost" alchemy of it—that finally catalyzes his desire to put form on canvas.
     While stark, provisional circumstances, abandoned boxes, lumber, frames, cloths and assorted rubble may connote disturbing conditions of our world, the fabrications Harsh makes from such elements exude a kind of teetering hope for the sheer power of image-making in paint. If his pictures could speak to a first glance, they might say "Stick with me, there's more here than meets the eye—"