Elyse Harrison

About the Artist

Elyse Harrison has been producing and exhibiting her art primarily in the Washington, DC area since the mid-1970s. Her work includes both fine art paintings and commercially commissioned site-specific murals. She is the recipient of a 2021 Independent Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, four Individual Artist Grants from The Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Maryland, and has produced ten murals for The Maryland State Arts Council’s Artists in Education Program. Her art has been reviewed in The Washington Post, The Gazette Newspapers, Modernism Magazine, and The Baltimore City Paper. She was the owner-operator of Gallery Neptune, a regional contemporary gallery from 2003-2010, and the owner-operator of Studio Neptune, an art education program from 1990-2017 both located in downtown Bethesda, Maryland. Recent exhibits include "Communicating Vessels" January - March 2020 at The American University Museum at The Katzen Center, curated by Dr. Claudia Rousseau, Ph.D. In addition to her fine art painting portfolio, Elyse has an online store, AVIARY ONLINE, featuring small-scale, mixed media art. This work has been produced and sold to collectors for the past 25 years and is included in the permanent collections of The Inova Schar Cancer Institutes.

Artist's Statement

In every facet of my life as an artist, I see the world as both logical and mysterious. My figurative paintings speak to this dichotomy by depicting ordinary human perceptions through extraordinary characters. I employ bold colors and patterns in my paintings which serve as a foundation for the solitary, absurd, and determined characters I invent. I am attracted to the hard-edged, precise techniques found in pop art, graphic design, and comic art which I utilize to produce direct, smoothly painted canvasses. The results are beguilingly simple, an easy gateway for the more complex psychological themes that stir beneath the surfaces of my work. Additional paintings include the Pool Painting Series which responds to the clean lines and repetitive patterning found in mid-century modernism.  My online store, AVIARY ONLINE, is a shop dedicated to the small, mixed media bird sculptures that I have been producing since the late 1990's. This small-scale work reflects my own love of object design and the countless ways I use color, texture, and form to create variations of these unique characters.