Informal Assessment by Rakhee Balaram, Associate Professor of Global Art & Art History, SUNY Albany, February 15, 2023
Sara Richman Harris’s portraits show a penetrating psychological insight. Similar to Alice Neel, Sara painted the people and communities she knew best.
Her landscapes, on the other hand, demonstrate a mystic strain that veer towards abstraction. Her color-rich lands and lakes are often bathed in a tender, misty light. Some show the moodiness and imagination of fellow New England artist, Albert Pinkham Ryder and a debt to American transcendentalism.
Hints of French modernism are apparent in her use of the Cézannesque “tache” and experiments in cubism and geometric abstraction that range from dreamy pastels to sharp, vibrant color.
Sara turns to outer space and reveals Cold War tension and 1950s politics in semi-abstract works like that of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. At the same time, she draws attention to her inner world in domestic still lifes and folk art as she investigates the poetic and the primitive of everyday life.
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