Art Sync: Seeing And Feeling

Elizabeth Johnson: In Bill Scott’s essay about you on the Woodmere Art Museum website, he recalls that your parents, Audrey Buller and Lloyd Parsons, both studied at The Art Students League of New York with Kenneth Hayes Miller. Scott says that they “were among the most prominent of realist painters, exhibited at top galleries, and saw their paintings acquired by the Whitney Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Scott continues: “Early on, however, her parents never encouraged her to follow in their footsteps for, as artists themselves, they had experienced the many disappointments too often encountered by a life in the arts. They feared the instability of such a life might lead their daughter to a wildly sad existence. Perhaps worse [. . . ] they worried she might move to Greenwich Village and live a life of ‘sin and debauchery!’” Did your parents invite you to paint or draw with them when you were a kid?

Penelope Harris: My parents were older when they had children. They weren't like the Wyeths, they didn't take us under their wing and teach us. They were so busy with their own careers, and they did commercial work for money. My sister and I were only in the studio when we posed for them. I remember my nose was running from asthma and hay fever while they were puffing away on their Camels as they painted. Aside from that, they were wonderful parents, and because of my admiration for them, I too wanted to be a painter.

EJ: Bill Scott recalls her advice: "give as much weight and simplicity as possible to [the] main forms, using color and detailed ornament as an extension of the basic form." Did you get your sense of color from your mother or both parents?

PH: That quote of her’s does describe how I work. Even though my parents didn’t teach us, I think I absorbed how they work through osmosis. Growing up, my mother, father, and I often went to museums together, looking and analyzing the work we saw. I think that really trained my eye. I love detail, but the form under the detail is more important to me. I try to express the light and the energy of the composition, and color is crucial.

EJ: Do you own pieces of your parents’ work?

PH: Yes, I have some in the house. I gradually discovered that I’m not as different in style from my parents as I had thought. For instance, I've always tilted tables to show what is on top of them. I found a painting of mother’s after she died that did this too. It was such a revelation to know that I used this compositional format without connecting it to her. As a child I was very influenced by early Renaissance work, I loved the way everything was facing forward. Art history taught me that each object held its own special place. It's very hard for me to put one object in front of another object because I like each so much.

PH: Before I was married, I worked in New York with a decorating firm. I enjoyed it, but it was a small part of my life: deep down I always wanted to paint.

EJ: Did interior design influence your sense of color?

PH: I've always been acutely aware of color. My mother said that when I was a child, I went to a birthday party with other little girls, then came back and described so precisely the colors they were wearing. I said, “Her dress wasn’t really orange, it was orange mixed with white with a slight dash of pink.”

EJ: Your paintings have origin stories. For instance, in Melon High I wonder, “How did that melon get there? And why?” This amuses me, it’s a weird situation: the melon is still and it is floating.

PH: I bought the huge glass jug at a flea market, and I thought, “I’ll use it in a painting someday.” At first, I filled it with water, thinking that would cause it to magnify things that I put behind it. But that didn’t work, so I emptied it and put the melon on a box behind it to create the subtle distortions I was after.

EJ: Don't you think it's a good thing your rational mind doesn't kick in until after you paint something?

PH: Yes, that is so true. I try to communicate the essence of the reality. I don’t use photographs. I want to express my reaction to what is there.

EJ: The piece in Study From The Studio Window catches my eye. It seems especially risk-taking.

PH: That’s a wintertime scene, mostly drawing in charcoal and pastel. For a long time, I thought it would be fun to do a black and white piece with jolt of color. It was November, I was on the floor looking up out the window, and I thought the black winter branches against the sky were exciting. I placed the three vibrant glass bowls in the foreground for contrast.