Harrison Burns was born and raised in North Carolina, and was told by his mother (Emilie’s grandmother) at the age of five or six that he would probably turn out to be an artist. He got a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and then attended the Douglas College of Rutgers University where he received his MFA. He shot beautiful black and white photography and made films in addition to his drawing and painting and sculpture. He eventually started teaching at Rutgers Preparatory School (and became Chairman of the Art Department) while he painted every day in his loft in Soho. He had gallery shows everywhere from Spain (where he spent his summers), New Orleans, Kentucky and Chicago, to some of the top galleries in NYC (including Fischbach, Iolas/Jackson and E.M. Donahue) as well as having paintings hung in MOMA and in the homes of famous collectors.

Harrison was passionate about art and could talk about it to anybody. He loved the television image and explored the universality of it in almost every one of his pieces, even the ones not based on tv shows or movies (you can see grid lines, snow and blips even in his Flowers and Islands series). He believed that there was magic in the television image and brought that out in his lovely, iconographic and mystical images exploring everything from Ava Gardner to “The Terminator”. Harrison passed away in 1991, but his work lives on. His paintings are as relevant today as they were 20 years ago, as I can undoubtedly say he was ahead of his time.