The first episode of a little project I started in April 2018: meeting local artists and letting their experience inspire us. My first guest was Norman Douglas Harvey, a colleague of mine at the United Nations and a painter who works in a basement studio a few minutes from home.
From Edinburgh to Brindisi
Norman is Scottish, from Edinburgh, where he studied fine art. About twenty years later he ended up in Brindisi, in the south of Italy, with his husband Silvio. Both of them follow their creative passions. Why here? Norman talks about the light: a dawn and a dusk that are just incredible. Scotland is always in his heart, but he believes everybody needs to go somewhere else in life, either to appreciate what they had or to see a new place with fresh eyes.
A wedding favour you have to bring back
My favourite story is their wedding favour. In Italy guests take home a bomboniera, usually a little piece of porcelain. Norman and Silvio did something different. They took one of their sketches of a local park, split it across sixty small canvases, numbered each one and painted them. At the end of the night (a typical Italian celebration, finishing at 5 a.m.) every guest got one piece of the puzzle. The only condition: everyone comes back in ten years to reassemble it and celebrate together. He smiles when he sees the pieces hung upside down in friends' kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms. As he puts it, if art makes you happy, you've achieved your goal.
Oil bars, colour and happy accidents
In the studio Norman showed me his oil bars, oil paint mixed with wax that starts to flow as it warms up and makes very natural marks. At art college he was taught to keep "happy accidents" and let them go instead of trying to recreate them. He calls himself a colourist: where you and I see green grass and a blue sky, he instinctively sees another, brighter range of colours. His ideas start as sketches on anything, even an envelope or a napkin. A holiday in the mountains of northern Italy inspired a new series of larger paintings, where he broke an old rule and started using black.
He's also been working for nearly two years on 25 portraits of women who influenced his life. None of them know yet. One day there'll be an exhibition, and they'll get a nice surprise.