Interview with Howard Harris

Visual reality is an ever-shifting, highly individualized experience. In any given moment, what we see reflects our inner state and synthesis of outer qualities—light, color, movement, and space. Harris’s exploration as a Techspressionist in photographic art represents an attempt to recreate the perceptual experience, with its dynamic nature and hidden complexities. Howard Harris has long been fascinated by both visual perception and design. The Denver, Colorado, USA native earned a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and a MID (Masters Industrial Design) from Pratt Institute in New York.  In 2017, Harris was granted a United States Patent for a Layered Artwork, proving his work's uniqueness and inventiveness. Since then, his work has appeared in many books and publications and is represented by US, U.K., and European galleries.

How did your early life in Denver and your education at the Kansas City Art Institute and Pratt Institute shape your approach to design and visual perception?

Being blind in Denver, Colorado, USA, opened my eyes.  For a few months, I was totally blind. The good news is that I can see well now.  However, as a teenager lying on an operating table, hearing the doctors saying that I would most likely be blind for the rest of my life was devastating.  Reflecting on that experience, separating fact from fictitious memories is hard.  But one clear memory is that sight was all I could think about.  What colors could I remember, what the clouds looked like, what my dog looked like, what my friends and family looked like, and what my life might look like blind?  Moving forward, after several operations, I could remove the bandages, open my eyes, and see the light, and after a few more months, my sight was fully restored.

That moment is indescribable, mentally, and visually, but it led to my fascination with eyes.

Here is a chronology of my “Eye” images:

• Mid 1960, I really didn’t think about sight till a rocket engine blew up in my face, blinding me for months.  My eyes took on a whole new meaning after being told I would be blind for the rest of my life.

• In 1979, I began photographing eyes.  This resulted in a poster for the Kansas City Art Institute to help with recruitment.

• In 2017, I met a photographer in Madrid who mastered, far better than I did, the art of photographing eyes and I had him photograph my eye.

• In 2018, I used the Madrid image to create an abstraction using my patented process.  This is the image that received critical acclaim and has been displayed internationally.  

Mentors opened my mind:  Throughout my life, I have been extremely fortunate to have many Mentors who’ve influenced my life's work and art.  Some Mentors had a significant, direction-changing influence, and many more helped refine my path, but all were critical to my artistic expression today.  

Here are my significant influences in chronological order.  Most reading this may not know who they are, but a few may know them and understand their influence on a more personal level.

• Will Howard - Denver: he was my 6th-grade teacher who was the first to help me realize that I could be and do anything.  If I could dream it, I could do it.  Don’t be afraid to fail – Only be afraid if you don’t try.   

• Mark Zamantakis - Denver: My high school art teacher gave me free rein to create whatever I wanted with any tools, median, or means it took.  This freedom helped me understand art comes from the heart, molded by the hand and interpreted through the mind’s eye.

• George Burris – Kansas City Art Institute: A college professor who helped me put the world of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture in a package that is best viewed with an understanding that one can’t fully understand any discipline from a single point of view.  

• Rowena Reed Kostellow – Pratt Institute, New York: This remarkable woman, my professor in graduate school, helped me learn how to harness a passion for the beautiful through a disciplined heart, hand, mind, and eye relationship.  She showed me the Zen of art.  She helped me control creative thought.  She helped me view life through the eyes of an interpreter.  She gave me the passion to see through all the glitter to the object's essence.  She permitted me to be an intelligent, fine artist and designer.

• Gerald Harris - Denver:  My father, who I worked with for over 30 years, in building a design-based company.  He helped me learn the business of business and to have a successful business, one must know how important honesty, integrity, and humility are to sustaining success. 

With over 35 years of experience combining design and technology, could you share a pivotal moment or project that significantly influenced your career trajectory?

My formal education was in Design.  My job was to interpret my client's wishes into something that satisfied the client's parameters.  That allowed me to design everything from medical equipment to stage sets, direct mail brochures, annual reports, websites, and more.  However, just creating based on what I believed to be arbitrary input often seemed a little hollow to me.  That’s when I turned to my understanding of computers and the power of eliminating the arbitrary.  Our company was one of the first design groups to accumulate and use what is now called Large Data.  Our databases had millions of households with hundreds of data points and were constantly updated.  The information from these large databases created relevance and a non-arbitrary basis for our designs.  Then, coupling this technology with various printing presses and image generators added to my technology arsenal and greatly improved my client's design experience and results.
These experiences were pivotal in coupling the creative mind with electronic technology and the machinery to enhance the finished product.

What inspired you to transition your creative focus to photography, and how has your background in design and technology influenced your approach to this medium?

From as early as I can remember, art of some type - painting, sculpture, photography, theater, etc. - has always been around me. It is only a foggy memory, but I took my first formal drawing class when I was 8 or 10. I still have two vivid memories of that class: One was that the course was held in an “artist” style loft (very cool), and the other was the teacher laughing at me when I drew a fox with a tail that looked like it exploded out of the fox’s rear end. For some reason, that failure just inspired me to refine my aspirations and pursue artistic projects following my intuition and imagination. And since I really couldn’t draw, I began using a camera, to capture images. From an early age, the technology of the camera became a passion. New technologies continually inspired my imagery, from black and white photos to the magic of color.  However, I found relying on my intuition wasn't enough. I needed more.  I began to study the methodology of art and found many of my questions answered through studying Industrial Design.  Studying Industrial Design gave me the structure necessary for my mind.  Design also gave me a structured methodology to move past the pure intuitive nature of my aesthetics.  Embracing technologies of all types became a natural extension I found necessary to create what my mind saw.

Could you elaborate on the concept of 'Techspressionism' in your work and how it differs from traditional photographic techniques?

This question is difficult to answer without knowing how photography evolved and Techspressionism emerged.  Historically, photography was a technology used to produce a visual record of the world.  It was said that photography could not be an art because a machine rather than a human made the image.  Later artists thought photography could be helpful as a reference but could not be considered equal to a drawing or a painting.  Then, art technologists used photographic forms like etching and lithography to create “art.”   Sometime around 1940 or so, photography began to be recognized by a few as an art form. 
In 2021, Anne Morgan Spalter wrote that Techspressionism was introduced as a new art-historical term to describe fine artists using digital technology to convey subjective, emotional content.  Techspressionism distinguishes expressive fine art from such genres as “digital art,” which can include animated movies and video games, as well as from “new media” works that do not embody convincing artistic intent.  The subjective lens of the individual artist (rather than the product of a corporate studio) connects Techspressionism to its predecessor, Expressionism. Expressionists presented the world from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically to evoke moods or ideas, seeking to express their emotional experience rather than physical reality. 
My art uses photography as a base image and various electronic technologies to enhance the photo further.  However, my use of technology doesn’t stop with electronics.  I further enhance imagery through a printing process called sublimation.  The sublimation process transfers special dies directly from a solid to a gas state and only occurs at specific temperatures and pressures.  This process moves the image from its electronic form to an aluminum surface, enhancing the color, luminosity, and vibrance.  I then use another technology called ultraviolet printing.  UV dyes are used to create a negative/positive gridded image on a clear acrylic surface that is attached to the aluminum.
To answer how my work differs from traditional photographic techniques, my process is not historically traditional but, in my opinion, may be considered a conventional photographic technique in the future.
And as Jackson Pollock said, “Each age finds its own technique.”
History will judge if Techspressionism will be a flash in the artistic journey or live on as an art movement.  I believe it will live on because art and technology have been one since the Cave Man used science to make pigments and created special rocks and brushes (technology) to create images.

Your patented process of layering images on acrylic surfaces is quite innovative. Could you walk us through the development of this technique and its significance in your art?

As a designer, I mainly create for my clients.  After selling my company, I decided to be my client.  I only knew that a camera would be an integral part of any art form I would pursue. Being a marketer and designer, I set out to differentiate myself from the rest of the photographic world. 
My love of Op Art and Chaos Theory created the mental breakthrough I needed to reimagine traditional photography and explore the hidden possibilities in a photo-based image. Different electronic technologies helped me unlock the static photo images, and perceptual science helped me develop my final technique.  The goal was then and still is to recreate my own perceptual experience, with all its dynamic nature and hidden complexities through imagery.
However, explaining my goal after the fact is much easier than achieving it.  I spent over three years experimenting with various images and processes before discovering the perceptual possibilities of using the grid's negative and positive unique attributes.  After that discovery, I experimented with an optical illusion called Parallax.  Since the human eye perceives objects that are close as larger than things that are further away, I used multiple visual layers inherent in my materials along with physical distance to create the final image.  Thus allowing for a diversity of viewer experiences depending on the viewer's state of mind, lighting, viewing angle, and movement. Abstraction became my next experiment to help give the viewer my vision of the image through color, line, and volume.

How do you aim to recreate the dynamic nature of the perceptual experience through your art, and what role do light, color, and movement play in this process?

I feel color is the synthesis of the image’s emotion. Color not only expresses the image’s emotion but also the image's hidden expression of line, plane, and volume. Color also adds detail to the existing image, creating a more dimensional viewer experience. I find that exaggerated color enhances the viewer’s perception of the image. Color vibrates the viewer’s natural parallax, creating the perception of dimension and movement.   Color also creates a deep feeling and emotional reaction beyond the viewer’s reason or thought. Without chromatic perception and abstraction, my images would be mute.

You mention the importance of universal design principles in creating beauty. Can you explain these principles and how they manifest in your work?

As Rowena Kostellow taught, the designer/artist has these significant elements to work with line, plane, volume, positive and negative space, light and dark value, texture, and color.  It's how one controls and organizes these elements that create beauty.  After four years of helping me to understand how to manipulate and evaluate those significant elements, I finally realized that even though the components are finite, the construct of those elements is infinite. However, I didn’t understand the Zen-like internalization of these design principles until I studied lines in space, Eastern philosophy, quantum physics, and chaos theory and concluded that the driving element in my work is the environment, and the observer always influences what is observed.

Having received numerous awards and recognitions, which do you find most gratifying, and how do these accolades influence your work and visibility as an artist?
I view all my awards and any recognition as important. As most artists know, creating art is a lonely job.  I often wonder if I am fooling myself by believing I’m creating images that some call art.  However, I am amazed that people with far more knowledge of the arts than mine recognize my work as important and worthy enough to be recognized.  These awards and recognitions have given me confidence in myself and my work.  However, each accolade, award, or recognition comes as a surprise because my primary goal is not to please others.  My goal is to please myself.

As a Trustee of The Kansas City Art Institute, what advice do you often find yourself giving to young artists who are just starting out?

Keep your mind as open as your eyes.
Believe in yourself.  

Understand that you must change as the world changes.  

Failure may only be momentary.  

Please don’t underestimate how hard it is to be an artist. 

And learn the business of art or, at a minimum, don’t ignore how important the understanding of the business world is to your success.

Looking forward, what new directions or projects are you excited about in the realm of photography and Techspressionism?

I will continue my quest to create dimensional photographic images with a deeper understanding of what Arshile Gorky once said about abstractions, “Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes… Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.”  I will continue my quest into the unknown depths of the creative process.  I will use any tool or technology that helps me release the energy of my thoughts and images.   As AI enables one's mind to become a camera into the ever-expanding depths of aesthetic thought, I expect to continue exploring the possibilities. As technology emancipates my ability to depict subjective emotions, I will continue to embrace the school of Techspressionism.
https://www.hharrisphoto.com