Rod Harman. Fish Don’t Climb Trees Frogs Go Plop.

About

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