Improve Your Acrylic Painting with Terry Harrison

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ART is everything. It is universal. Paintings is one of those arts.

I like paintings because it really emphasizes the real essence of everything. It is an abstract way of filing emotions, transparent distribution of feelings and a concrete way of exaggerations. When you are painting something, your feelings would reflect on what you're painting. You cannot hide you feelings to everybody because it can directly be seen in contact to the paintings even if you deny the fact, the reality will still come out. As what I've stated above, it emphasizes the essence of everything.   
                                                     

Power Heart

Acrylic on watercolor paper, 22" X 30", 1998.

The earth opens up to receive the golden light of heaven channeled through the human heart.

This painting shows the harmonious love of GOD for us.

1990's, Art, Gustavo,

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For example, this painter emphasizes maybe, he loves really music,or he is a musically inclined person. For he extracted the meaning of this, as we can see in the picture. Im not saying that he is truly showing his feelings. What if he is only tasked to do it? what if somebody only told him to paint that kind of painting?

Well, but  in my own opinion, if he  was tasked to do it or not, if his not in the mode to do it, the result would come out imperfectly, or it feels something is lacking. And it will really reflect on the painting for instance

 
Path of hope #3″ (1990′s) –

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The painter maybe, was very determined as what I have internalize about the painting, He really deepen up a his life in the way of his painting, he emphasizes a faithful and a hopeful person. Or maybe, he's sending us a message through his paintings that we should not loose our hope in every struggles, for GOD is always with us, and HE is always there to light up our way and HE will truly make a way. Always think  positive.

Herbert Creecy: Paintings from the 1990s 

by Debra Wolf Vibrant color, dense patterning, and exploration of surface form fundamental aspects of the late Herbert Creecy’s four decades of creating art. “Herbert Creecy: Paintings from the 1990s” 

exhibits more than a dozen large-scale canvases highlighting this singular voice in 20th century 

abstraction.  

Roots 

Born in 1939 in Virginia, Herbert Creecy was raised in Atlanta, Georgia. Endowed with talent and 

drive, he made the most of his opportunities at a young age. After attending the University of 

Alabama for several years, Creecy returned to Georgia to study at the Atlanta College of Art, 

where he received his degree in 1964, and was given an unprecedented one-man show at the 

High Museum of Art in the same year. Following his graduation, he received a French 

Government Fellowship to study at the prestigious Hayter Atelier in Paris.  

The New York art scene beckoned. Creecy’s paintings were acquired by museums as early as 

the 1970s, as he  exhibited steadily in both group and solo shows, primarily in the Southeast, but 

also at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in New York, New Orleans, and in 

Europe. But the artist chose to remain in Georgia, where he painted, sculpted, taught, and 

eventually installed himself in the rural community of Barnesville in 1979. There, he transformed 

an old cotton warehouse into both residence and workplace, his home base for the next 24 years, until his death in 2003. 

Whistling Wind (1999) 

Mixed media, 68 x 68 inches Herbert Creecy: paintings from the 1990s  |  Exhibition Catalogue Essay  

Process 

The Barnesville studio ideally suited Creecy’s highly physical process. Surfaces told the tale, ranging from subtly layered to stridently impastoed as Creecy stroked, splattered, collaged, 

raked, dripped, and sprayed. His noholds-barred gestural approach and large-scale format garnered him frequent comparisons to Jackson Pollock. But Creecy’s influences ran broad and deep, reflecting a passion for nature, an acute awareness of his environment, and examination of issues that preoccupied both modern and post-modern abstractionists. He explored space and color, pushed materials to new effects, and sought to engage the viewer both conceptually and viscerally. The unconscious, the emotive, the act itself of painting – these elements figured heavily as well, taking a cue from European surrealism and post-war abstraction, as well as American abstraction expressionism. 

In the 1970s and early 1980s, charged lines, squiggling curves, and flirtations with figuration filled jazzy and lush imaginary landscapes. The artist frequently opted for bright, confectionary hues 

 © Debra Wolf, 02/2008 2  

that became part of his signature look. The physicality of his process was clearly visible. So, too, 

was the mix of moods he poured out onto canvas in sprawling, biomorphic forms that seemed to 

reveal eyes, birds, and colliding fragments of earth and sky. 

Constantly revisiting his images,  Creecy seemed to hold little as static or sacrosanct. By the 

1990s, he was surrounded by canvases. They were stacked, stored or laid out on the floor of his 

studio. Many hovered in a perpetual unfinished state; Creecy was known to paint over seemingly 

completed works, and to slice apart others, layering bits and pieces onto newer works in process. 

Lyricism 

Although his style and compositions from the 1970s and early 1980s were easily recognized and 

highly praised, Creecy never ceased experimenting. He tested palettes, periodically incorporated 

fragments of figuration, varied the sculptural quality of his surfaces, and investigated unusual 

ways to lay down paint. 

In the late 1980s, Creecy embarked on a new direction, as curvy, all-over patterning emerged in a 

connective and fluid structure. This was a changing voice – more lyrical, more streamlined, but no 

less expressive. Its visual ambiguity was purposeful, fertile, and referential. Circular shapes 

rippled through these compositions, teeming like mouths and beaks, eyes and heads, cells and 

blossoms. Echoing earlier motifs (in more explicitly 

abstracted form), these new compositions played with metaphor and perception. Swerving contours and abutting, angular passages had always been part of Creecy’s visual alphabet, but now his paintings roiled with a tempered turbulence, rhythmic and sensuous, set against varying backgrounds. Areas of canvas were left raw. Chromatic choices were alternately vibrant and somber, expansive and 

reductive. Spiraling, at times nearcalligraphic brushstrokes destabilized compositions of interlocking patterning. Formidable in scale, some of these works stretched to 12 feet wide and 9 feet tall. Their stature demanded participation from the audience, forcing the viewer to move back, approach, and 

walk alongside, inviting the eye to slowly navigate complex and nuanced surfaces.