Harry Ousey

The paintings of Harry Ousey are the product of a love affair between himself and the land. His paintings betray a passion for and assimilation of all matters of landscape and terrain. They are full of the richness of nature – the sombre shadows across the deepening folds of hills, the unexpected brilliance of light on a thin stream. He saw his paintings as re-creations, memories perhaps of a trapped visual experience, containing those elements of nature that the eye exaggerates and retains. He believed that it is possible only in the abstract to express the effects of landscape. In many of Ousey’s paintings, colour and texture are used to create a mood or feeling, to protect an atmosphere by which the painting may be explored. After planning he worked quickly.

It mattered very much to Harry Ousey where he lived and worked: Scotland, the Cotswolds, Cornwall and lastly Provence. Throughout his career he made drawings of the natural world he found in these places. Sometimes they became ‘finished ‘ paintings: more often they were preliminaries, initial explorations to be developed later. In this he has strong affinities with Victor Pasmore and Alan Reynolds. What Reynolds wrote in his 1961 notebooks has a considerable relevance to Harry Ousey’s life and work.

‘ What I desire in my paintings is structure and through that structure, poetry – the kind of poetry that is instinctive with abstract visual form…………It is the image, the thing in itself which is for me important. The abstraction is the reality’.