Artist Richard Harris: ‘Watercolors and birds keep calling me back’

Birds “connect the earth and the heavens,” Las Cruces artist Richard Harris said. “I watch and observe and love them. They watch and observe and teach me.”

While his watercolors are accurate in detail, what he calls his “bird studies” have evolved, Harris said, and he said he often uses unusual colors for the birds he paints, as in his multi-hued “Pop Art Owl.”

As a “fanatic ornithologist,” Harris said he is fascinated by birds’ resourcefulness: hummingbirds and doves washing off under a sprinkler; the intelligence of hawks, crows, eagles, owls and other hunting birds; the loyal and protective natures of most species: watching the leader change in a flying vee and seeing two healthy birds following an injured bird to the ground and staying with it until dies.

“They are spiritual messengers,” he said.

“I’ve painted since I was a boy,” said Harris, who was born in the Chelsea district of southwest London in 1954. He said his love for birds began around age 10, when his parents gave him a book about British birds. At age 12, Harris moved with his parents to a 16^th-century farmhouse in Coventry, where he was surrounded by ponds, meadows and nature.

“That was how I connected to both myself and the world around me,” he said. “I wanted to get a closer look at the miracles that were happening all around me.”

Harris said he remembers as a child catching a blue tit and holding it in his hands before releasing it.

“I wanted desperately to capture the essence of that bird and interpret it in my own way,” he said.

Harris moved to the United States with his first wife, an American citizen who wanted to come home, and their twins in 1982, settling in Illinois for five years before moving to Connecticut, where he lived and worked as a landscape designer for 30 years. After retiring in 2016, Harris and his second wife moved to Las Cruces.

“We like the Southwest a lot,” Harris said. “We’ve been coming here for years.”

In retirement, Harris has renewed his interest in painting. And, although he paints the occasional rabbit or fox and uses different media, “watercolors and birds keep calling me back,” he said.

Harris had a solo show at MAS Art in Las Cruces and has been part of group shows at Branigan Cultural Center, Café de Mesilla and Phillips Gallery. He is a new member of the New Mexico Watercolor Society, and the former president of the Middletown Art Guild in Connecticut.

In Las Cruces, Harris said he has learned from other local artists, especially Julie Ford Oliver and Nancy Begin. And, while he has found the birds of the Southwest different from those in his native England and other parts of the U.S., he said his connection to them is the same.

Birds, he said, “are speaking to us loudly at this moment.” They have the same five senses as humans, and the same four-chambered heart. But their metabolism is different, and they are “feeling and sensing what’s out there at a much higher frequency,” he said.

About a third of the world’s bird population – some three billion birds – have been lost since 1970, Harris said, because of issues like climate change, loss of habitat and pesticide use.

“They are a signal for us that something is drastically wrong,” he said. “I believe the canary in the coal mine is screaming, ‘Enough!’” 

Harris has first Arts Council show in October

Las Cruces artist Richard Harris’ solo show, “Wing Whispers, Avian Life Lessons,” is at the Doña Arts Council (DAAC), opening Monday, Oct. 5, and continuing through Friday, Oct. 30.

The show includes 50 pieces of Harris’ art in a variety of sizes. This is his first show for DAAC. All his pieces will be for sale, and “reasonably priced,” Harris said.

DAAC is located at 250 W. Amador Ave., at the corner of Amador and Alameda Boulevard.

Hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday, with a special second-Saturday opening, noon-5 p.m. Oct. 10.

Contact DAAC at 575-523-6403 or admin@daarts.org. Visit daarts.org.