A feature on our 2002 Artist of the Year, Bill Harris, by Fredericksburg's finest art critic, Kathryn Willis

The nude sits in a wooden chair, just off compositional center. There's a phone book in her lap, a watch on her arm, and an ancient rotary phone. Sinewy smoke rises in the air from her
cigarette. In the room behind her, just beyond the door jam, we see a pair of legs.

It's a setting that begs a story. But Harris' interiors aren't the recordings of moments in time
that are likely to have happened. They are, instead, pictorial interpretations reflecting the un-
centered psyche of enigmatic figures.

Often, the interiors are just slightly skewed. The perspective might never pass the Renaissance test of a well-determined vanishing point, but it is certain that the viewer is acutely aware of his presence in the composition.

The image is often a labyrinthine arrangement of rooms within rooms, or mirrored reflections
— settings that add confusion to just exactly where we are. 

Take, for example, being drawn into the canvas by the vulnerable eyes of a young girl, scissors in hand, ready to chop off jagged strands of her thick hair. We witness this private, disquieting moment through a mirrored reflection and sense that this haircut has nothing to do with fashion.

This lovely young girl is in a bathroom — a frequent setting — yet the metaphor of restoring
mind and body to a state of cleanliness simply does not fit. Instead, we're jarred into the
dissonant chords sounded by her interior struggle.

The implied narrative unfolding with our young dark-haired beauty is made more evocative by the presence of old books and a claw-footed tub. Harris' style is one of economy and control, and we intuitively know that objects such as those musty old books are not included by random choice. What they signify is a different question, one of many that mesmerizingly hold our attention.

Harris has a sensitive finger on the psychological pulse of our uneasy contemporary nerve. He senses the pressure points of the alienated youth and the edge-of-society people that exist in
these disquieting scenarios. His subjects contemplate their next action seemingly without a clue about where to go or whom to ask for an answer.

Often these young people are nude, or nearly so. But the nudity isn't so much about sexuality as it is about psychological vulnerability—like having a dream that places you in that exam
room, sweating the answers while you sit there with no clothes on.

This is not to say that the nudes in Harris' work aren't sensual. They are — achingly so, with
their languishing arms and legs, sensitive hands, delicate fingers. Look, for example, at the
delicious back view of a nude, posed in the style of Ingres' Odalisque. Beautiful she may be, but if you're expecting reassurance that classic, attainable beauty can still exist, don't seek it here. This nude has a briery tattoo squarely etched onto the small of her back.

Harris' palette of drab olives, deep tans and acid oranges complements these ambiguous
emotional oscillations. What redeems these canvasses from the muddy mess that they could have become is Harris' color discipline. Hue, saturation, intensity are held in careful balance. In the space of the canvas, it is Harris that is in control — a control that is also evident in those seemingly effortless, un-textured brushstrokes. They are smoothed with a disciplined remove that is at psychological odds with the intensity of the moments he depicts. Harris doesn't fight his medium; this brushwork is not viscerally engaged. Instead it is his visual conversation with his subjects that is visceral.

The light in Harris' universe is subdued, defining its subjects with a speckled and compromised light as weak as late-autumn sun falling on wet leaves. Its mottled evidence can be seen on surfaces from interior wall and tabletop to the porcelain-skinned cheek of a young girl. But there is the occasional, illuminating long vanilla lick of pigment that slides down a leg, or the delicate touch of just-off white that defines the fingertip or the toe, that tell us of Harris' own suppressed love of the painterly that he uses so sparingly, and effectively, in his work.

So, why do we look? What is it about Harris' work that makes it so compelling? Perhaps it's his sure draftsmanship. Or his uncanny creativity in making the familiar so eerily haunting.

Or his easy brushwork, with just the right touch of sparkle and creamy light, strategically
placed. Or his strong composition.

Or his off-center humor (who can resist the leering cartoon figure on the poster watching the
nude, while the word-bubble declares "o boy"?).

Or perhaps it's the sum of all parts, when they work harmoniously in sounding an
unharmonious disquiet. Being drawn into these haunting interiors gives us permission to
acknowledge our own ambiguous feelings of alienation, sensuous desire, and suppressed anger, and our own clueless-ness about where to go, or how to seek our own answers.

Kathryn Willis of Falmouth reviews Exposure Unlimited's anniversary exhibit in next month's Front Porch.