Bio

Doris Harris, who signs her paintings D’Harris, was born in Los Angeles, California. Since childhood she has been interested in painting and won her first award at the age of twelve. Her formal education was at UCLA where she studied under Sam Amato and received private instruction from Serge Baumgart. She furthered her studies in Italy and maintained her own studio on Via della Purificazione in Rome. Her works have been widely shown in Italy and may be found in many private collections in Europe and the United States.

Doris Harris’s uninhibited use of color reflects a strong influence of the Fauves, the “Wild Beasts” of the early 20th Century. Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Maurice Vlaminck (1876-1958), and Andre Derain (1880-1954) were the major painters of this movement that extended the symbolic, expressionistic color of Gauguin and Van Gogh by completely freeing color from its traditional role of describing the natural appearance of an object. By using color as an independent, expressive element, Doris displays the same exhuberance and vitality as the innovative Fauves. Her delight in the raw sensation of color in this series of Italian landscape paintings conveys a voluptuous sense of richness and earthy dynamism. Her colors become charges of dynamite, explosive and emotional, linking her closely with the attempts of the Fauves to “raise paintings above the real.” As she saturates each canvas with brilliant, intense color she reestablishes her link with the past while stepping boldly into the expressionistic world of contemporary painting.

“I am deeply attached to the lush, sundrenched Italian countryside. As a painter this radiant atmosphere suits me perfectly, for I revel in the sensations and richness of color. I transfer these sensations to my canvases to create dynamic, color-laden images of the world around me. Each brushstroke of applied color lends an intrinsic excitement to my work, building to a crescendo of powerful vibrancy. My compositions are based upon a solidarity of form and mass that allows all parts to relate to the unified whole, and the robust and powerful effect of pure color imbues these sculptural forms with a potent, flowing life force. This reflects my personal ‘joie de vivre’! My painting is a creative testimony to the sources of joy that lie within me and are expressed creatively. I believe in combining reality with a deeply personal and expressive journey into sensation through the use of joyful, exhuberant color. I feel this helps my work achieve a powerful earthiness and gives it its universally uplifting appeal.” D’Harris