Michael Harnish is an artist working in LA whose loose, floral paintings created from quirky paper and photograph collages have a soft and vintage charm.
Harnish's practice has two seemingly separate bodies of work, he creates paintings with a quick and decisiveness that push against his series of the well-studied flower, painted to photographic perfection. The subjective work sustain a sketch-like quality that is pushed further by their drastic crops and layers of pattern and neon colour. His paintings are built as collages and then recreated in thick, playful brushstrokes. He allows his reference material to come through in the final paintings by allowing their white, polaroid-like borders to remain, and replicating coloured paper with pigment. The colour palette is impressively cohesive, focusing on antique pinks, deep forest greens, and bright punches of highlighter yellow.
In Michael Harnish's work, the combination of still life and abstract painting are brought together in a fresh and exciting way, as he uses both painting and collage to explore composition in a California colour palette.
