COCA COLA on the Hill, Jim Harrison, Old Barn and Sign

Description

Coca Cola on the Hill
Jim Harrison
This print was published as an open edition,
But is signed by the artist
The print was published in 1997
The image size is: 12”x8”
The print was published by: Jim Harrison Prints
This print has never been framed and has been
stored flat since publication.
Jim Harrison
“I long to go back in time…when a simple pleasure was a luxury.
Yep…way back in time to the good ol’ days…”
For artist Jim Harrison a bond of long affection exists between himself and the subjects he paints. As he paints, Jim finds himself carried into the life of the scenes he is depicting---scenes long familiar, preserved in his mind’s eye, just changed by time. It often seems that Jim did not choose his subject so much as the subject seems to have chosen him - chosen him to represent it for all time.
The time Jim has spent with paintbrush has taken many unusual turns over the years. There were long summers helping J. J. Cornforth paint commercial billboards and long winter evenings at home practicing straight lines on a home-made drawing board. “It wasn’t until I worked with Miss Zita Mellon at the Allendale Art Studio that I gained enough confidence to take a year off to try painting full time.” It was then that Jim started putting the old signs on buildings in his canvases - the very same signs he had been painting on billboards with Mr. Cornforth a decade earlier. “I still paint signs,” Jim chuckles. “Now I just happen to put’em in my pictures.”
Jim’s thoughtful ‘down home’ quality is as readily apparent to the viewer as is the emotional intensity of the man who wields the brush. He especially likes to paint isolated buildings - buildings that seem to have been inhabited long ago. He implies the human presence by means of things used or shaped by those lives. He paints the ‘mood’ of the place; he captures the warmth of the sun, the cool mist of an early morning.
Home for Jim and his wife Margaret is Denmark, South Carolina, where he has lived since he was a child. “I have a consuming desire to stay right here and keep things as they are. Why, I still have the same post office box we did when I was six years old,” he says without apology.
Although Jim hesitates to view his own art as social commentary, he does feel that he is making a strong statement about the ‘good ol’ days’. He yearns to preserve the lifestyle he remembers and he wants desperately to capture the vanishing face of the countryside that he loves.