Danna Harvey

Artist Biography

During her years of study at the Glassell School of Art and the University of Houston, Danna Harvey was a figurative painter in watercolor, collage, and oil mediums. Later, while working on a project for a Houston gallery, she inadvertently placed a piece of kitchen waxed paper over several landscape photographs. She was drawn to the way the wax film changed the feeling of the landscape, and realized this reaction was pivotal in the development and direction of her work.

Harvey found that a variety of subjects, including landscapes, could often be more subtly effective as pretexts for human emotions than just the human figure itself. She is interested in finding appropriate compositions and palettes to stir particular feelings. She uses the calendar/grid format and more recently, the horizontal line, to evoke a psychologically reassuring calm.

Although her palette and forms are easily recognizable as views of nature, they are never actual geographical locations and are sometimes distilled to near abstraction. Using an encaustic technique, a completed painting is entombed in multiple layers of wax. The mixture can be opaque and creamy, or thin and translucent; like looking into ice.

Harvey is engaged in a continuing process of self-examination, and her paintings are created out of a need for personal resolve. The paintings are quiet and hopefully they reflect the painter's pursuit of a quiet spirit.

Danna Harvey Art, Prints and Posters Collection