Dan Harland West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Dan Harland is a painter based in Leeds, U.K. He translates the collage of memory and imagination that occupies the mind's eye, in Oil and Acrylic. Motifs such as goal posts and unruly brambles appear as representations of the push and pull of fear and sanctuary in childhood and throughout life.
Dan Harland is a painter whose themes orbit fear and sanctuary through the eyes of an individual navigating a path through the social ecosystem. Harland uses a combination of memory and imagination to describe the process of recollection and the subsequent unconscious connotations. Harland is interested in visualisation, or the mind’s eye. The one thing nobody else can understand without a visual interpretation. It can’t be found on google images or in a photograph or in the physical world. It requires the artist’s hand to translate.
Memories are distilled into motifs which combine with imagined connotations which turn into preparatory drawings to paint from. These drawings act as a framework for a basic composition but the details are realised as paint is applied. When specific references are required then photography may be used but it is avoided where possible. Memory is more vivid than reality and photography more muted. Memory is unreliable; therefore, the painting process is constantly unpredictable and alive.
Harland works in both large and small scale. The large act as a portal to a walkable world of a vast scope. The small are a keyhole to peer through on a fragment of narrative.
Influences include classic illustrations of fairy tales, the film and television that formed the foundations for the imagery of fear and sanctuary, and real-world examples. From gnarled trees, grabbing at your clothing as you run from the huntsman in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to the football goal in a recently mown field; a place to be with friends without the social minefield of conversation.
Harland uses oil and acrylic paint with occasional use of drawing and printing. He uses oil because of it’s malleability. The ease of editing; removing and reapplying, which mimics the refocussing and rapid associations that come with the frenetic thought processes of a mind in fight or flight.
