Harry Bauld’s thick, colorful canvases are intensely observed landscape paintings of the natural spaces and hues in New York and Vermont.
I’M A POET AND A PAINTER, two arts that, like instrumental music, seem connected by their productive ambiguities and origins in attempting somehow to render through a medium—words or paint— inarticulate vision and experience. Gauguin famously (supposedly!) said, “If you see a tree as red, paint it red!” A native New Englander who is a longtime New York resident (for the last several years in the Bronx), I have been trying to see the red trees, to surrender to the way “natural” colors and forms, transformed by the gaze of long acquaintance, can open views in multiple directions and spaces. Also, I just like to play with paint or, to put it differently, because I also play jazz piano, I like listen to colors as if they were pitches and follow their interactions, as the rhythm section listens and responds to a soloist, and vice versa.
As a high schooler I attended classes at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston, and, mesmerized in the museum by the Van Goghs, I could (in those innocent days when the few guards weren’t looking) actually brush my fingers quickly over his landscapes, a tactile transgression I confess today but still can’t regret; it put me literally in touch with the talismanic surface of the past and cemented an enduring appreciation for the life and possibilities of paint itself.
In my own painting, I try to be alert specifically to the ways looking intensely at landscape, whether along the Hudson or Connecticut Rivers, yields the kind of pleasure and changed perspective to be had from familiarity with a favorite poem. Often playing along the border between an impressionist naturalism and an attraction to abstraction fostered by influences as seemingly different as late Monet, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Mark Rothko, I try to hew to the dictum of another New York-to-Vermont painter, Wolf Kahn, who said a painting should have “contrast, drama, and austerity.” Goals to aspire to.
– Harry Bauld
Harry Bauld is a poet, painter, translator and teacher in the Bronx. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals in the U.S. and the U.K. He was included by Matthew Dickman in the anthology Best New Poets 2012 (UVa Press) and his paintings have been exhibited in galleries in Vermont and reproduced in journals. He has performed in venues in New York and elsewhere as a jazz pianist and magician.
harrybauld.com
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