Harry Little

Through my work I express the discomfort of the present. I am driven to create socio-political commentaries, and through these I try to express the anxieties, tension and isolation found within our twenty first century society.

I am very process driven. I work with oil paint on wood boards. I manipulate countless layers of paint across my boards, constantly applying and removing, scraping and labouring the paint until it fulfils its intended purpose. My paintings flourish through a combination of chance and precision and can take from days to months to become finished. I enjoy trying to distort the paint into a surface that bares no physical signs of human contact, as I feel this allows the artwork to breach the gap between painting and image. This helps my works move from paintings into my chosen depictions. Regardless of a piece’s outcome, it is not discarded; instead, when a painting loses its intended form it is stripped of paint and reworked repetitively and obsessively until it aesthetically represents its exact intention. 

While my painting process is seemingly jumbled and random, there is a distinct and direct style to it. This is also true about my work’s subject matter; while a works meaning may seem tangled and unclear, each piece holds a solid and thought out meaning. 

My art has developed as a body of expression derived from my own personal experiences, challenges, and viewpoints, and therefore, inevitably, acts as a deeply personal form of expression to me. Content wise,  my work currently explores two different avenues which intersect and can become tangled. The first is expression through the personification of my emotional state of mind. The works exist to ‘challenge and confront’ the viewer with honest depictions of the discomfort of reality. The second is through painting scenarios of socio-political relevance to myself. I enjoy working around themes of inequality, discomfort and claustrophobia within our current society. I  try to orchestrate a scene or situation picked from our current society which I find noteworthy or relevant. Recently, my painting’s inspirations currently apply to the second type of painting.