Jason Harris

Jason Harris (b. 1989) makes drawings in color pencil, ink pens, and watercolor. He approaches art making with an open mind, but favors bright, colorful images with great detail that include architecture, land- and cityscapes, interior scenes and portraiture. Rather than presenting a factual reality in his landscapes, Harris uses a cartoon-like sense of line and color that reorganizes the information into a nostalgic environment. In portraiture, he makes use of caricature, but without the irony – his subjects seem more like themselves than they do in real life and Harris makes use of age-old portraiture backdrop techniques to bring out the sitter’s individual role, personal interests, and history. Somewhat scholarly in his approach to drawing, the extreme sense of detail and light touch create an atmospheric quality that brings important objects into focus and highlights depictions and ideas that can only be realized in drawing. Jason Harris lives in the neighborhood of Gresham and he joined Project Onward in 2011.