Local artist profile: Harvey Gordon

By Corin Blust
Sun contributor
In grade three, Harvey Gordon looked around at the artwork of other students in his class and realized that he was pretty good in comparison to most of them. That was when it hit him that he could one day become a professional artist.
“I like drawing… I’ve just enjoyed it all of my life, and I still do,” Gordon told me over coffee.
Gordon paints with acrylics, but he was initially trained in oil painting because acrylics were not widely distributed until the early 1960’s, when they finally became available to him. He fell in love with the medium once he found it; its brilliant colors, fast drying ability, durability, and water solubility made it the perfect paint for Gordon, who didn’t like the hazardous chemicals that need to be used when painting with oils.

It has taken Gordon 40 years to develop and perfect the carefully planned glazing technique he uses when creating one of his paintings. He is currently painting on a heavyweight, extremely high-quality paper called museum board, which he seals with gesso to keep the paint from soaking in.
After sanding the gesso down, Gordon draws a picture on the board using a photograph he has taken as a reference. Then his unique technique begins.
“I use acrylic paint, very little paint, with acrylic gloss medium… I paint the drawing first in black and white, then I put the color on in transparent, single layers of yellow, red and blue,” explained Gordon. He never physically mixes the color together; “all the mixing that occurs in the painting is visual mixing,” he said.
This process is important because it provides a remarkably beautiful, luminous finish to the acrylic, a paint that is often visually flat and boring in the hands of inexperienced artists. Gordon’s paintings are reminiscent of stained glass because of the glowing intensity of his colors. They also remind the viewer of watercolor.
“There is a luminosity that you get in watercolor that is visible in my work as well because a lot of the white ground shows through,” clarified Gordon.
While working in his studio, Gordon uses fluorescent lighting. He does this because it is the best light to paint by, but it is a horrible light to view a painting in. When Harvey Gordon moves his work to a kinder light he is often genuinely surprised at the colors that have developed in his process.
“It even amazes me, some of the colors in my paintings. It’s that method, that technique that yields those colors — and of course what I’ve learned over 40 years of making them,” Gordon said.
His paintings will be nicely hung and well lit when they are displayed at Lake Street Studios’ Center Gallery from August 25-31. The works that will be on display will be exclusively new work, dating from about three years ago to the most recently finished piece, which at press time was still on Gordon’s easel in his studio.
Gordon draws a lot of his inspiration from the environment he finds himself in. He taught two-dimensional media at Glen Oaks Community College for 28 years before he and his wife, Barbara, relocated to Glen Arbor. There, he was attracted to painting things he saw on a regular basis: interiors and cityscapes.
What inspires me to paint “is probably a combination of two things: first of all, its my innate desire to paint paintings. And, its just the world I live in, and what is around me- not everything, but some things,” he said.
Cityscapes appeal to Gordon because of the rare mix of people often present on an urban street. “You get this wonderful… democratic vista because there are all kinds of people, from all kinds of backgrounds and socioeconomic backgrounds, and they are all there mixed together, and it makes it interesting,” Gordon told me.
A new subject that Gordon was inspired to take on in the last two years because of his new vicinity to Lake Michigan is the sunset, a notoriously difficult phenomenon to paint properly.
“I decided that, well, we live here and I can get to the lake in two minutes if there’s a sunset worth going to look at. So, I have been photographing sunsets and I have taken on a series of paintings of sunsets. And there will be some in the show,” he revealed.
Even though Gordon has enjoyed a successful painting career, exhibiting at least seven one person shows at top galleries in New York City and at museums and important galleries all over lower Michigan, he still counts a successful painting as the ultimate highlight of his career.
“The highlights occur in my studio, and not with respect to anything that happens to me or my work after it leaves the studio. Maybe there’s a sale, maybe there isn’t. Maybe there’s a big show, maybe there isn’t. But all that stuff is secondary to creating the best possible painting. I don’t see how it could happen any other way,” he explained.
Gordon grew up in Flint. He attended the University of Michigan and Cranbrook Academy of Art. He then received a fellowship at the University of North Carolina, where he earned his MFA.
Harvey Gordon’s work will be on display at the Lake Street Studio’s Center Gallery from August 25-31.