Mark Harris is a painter out of goldsmiths college in London. He’s an esteemed artist in galleries all over the east coast presently and has shown work world wide. We have shared interest in punk music, the psychedelia movement of the 1960’s, and the counterculture nature of the drug industry today. And to top it off he’s my professor for advanced painting. I went to a talk with some folks from class who, at the time, I didn’t even really know. Admittedly I was just going to get some extra credit for this professional practices class that I really had a hard time enjoying. But I sat down in the front row and Mark – quiet as ever is introduced and takes the podium. He begin by talking about his experiences growing up in college and how the various happenings there (he was removed from school for an incident involving LSD) and continued on to reference various bands of the British punk movement and how that reflected hippie communes. Especially referencing the sort of underground art that came out of that. In finality he was talking about how he and another artist searched Europe for access to marijuana grow houses and gardens for a performance piece where they would read from different counterculture related texts in front of the gardens. Going into this talk I really didn’t know much about Mark. I knew we got along well in class, that he generally seemed to like my work no matter how novice it may be but I never knew our conceptual interests overlapped so heavily. It was quite eye opening.
GuyDogBus 