About Harriet
About Harriet's Work
Harriet Evans is a British contemporary artist specialising in drawing.
Very cleverly (she feels,) she waited until she was a mature student to study for a degree in Fine Art at Chichester University, and therefore didnt need to get distracted by alcohol and misbehaviour. (These elements of university life were thoroughly explored during her first attempt at a degree in her delightful teen years.) She was consequently able to concentrate on working hard and awarded a First Class Honours Degree.
During this time, she met her gorgeous now husband, Brett, and they moved back to Kent together in 2010 and had a couple of babies. Now that they aren't babies any more, Harriet has lovely parts of her week, sometimes hours at a time, during which she is free to ignore the housework and make art in her small but perfectly formed studio room (with a key on the inside).
She is mightily happy and proud to be doing her very favourite thing for a job and hopes that you love her work as much as she loves to make it.
When she started at university (the 2nd time round), Harriet's tutor asked the class to do a drawing exercise in which they drew a life model without looking at their paper. This, she later discovered, is called blind drawing. Then, the students used a pencil in each hand to draw a single picture, using both hands together. "Wow" thought Harriet to herself. "This feels awesome" she mumbled to her happy self. (Or words to that effect.)
This moment was something of a breakthrough for Harriet, who loved to draw, and wasn't especially interested in colour, or painting, or all that jazz, but hadn't found a way to show the energy, emotion and intensity she wanted to express in her work.
These techniques allowed her to focus on really developing her observational drawing skills so that she could use the line to bring life and feeling to her drawings.
She, more than anything else, wants people to have an emotional response to her work.
She loves to morph human form with skeletal elements and with animals. She researches folklore, legend and mythology, striving to connect these archaic tales of morals and good versus evil, with our everyday struggles and hardships to try to make some sense of our complex multi faceted modern day existence. To say to people, "It's OK, we are all bumbling through our messy lives together. You aren't the only one who feels like this."
Some people call her work 'dark', but she doesn't see it that way. She likes to think of it as honest; as a true representation of the multitude of feelings and experiences we encounter every day.