Glenn Harrington
by Bob Waite
Walking into the of Glenn Harrington’s studio in Pipersville for the first time is an experience I will never forget. Glenn, soft spoken and humble, meets me with a welcoming smile. All around me are beautiful paintings of people and a few landscapes too. These paintings have a depth, which I have only seen in the paintings of the Old Masters. In them are swatches of primary colors, always shades of red and grays, all interwoven into these portraits of people caught in their essential greatness—sitting, standing—at home, outside, by brooks and old structures, on farms and in woods. Caught by the beauty, the viewer is immediately brought into something deeper than a mere picture.
Glenn seems oblivious to his obvious genius. He says in a matter of fact way, “I don’t want to give them (his subjects) my own impression of who I think they should be. I look for the most pleasant side of the person I meet.” So Glenn looks for the person and their inner beauty. It is an essentialist outlook. It is a statement at odds with much modern art, which denies essence and sees existence as blind being. To Glenn Harrington, art has an aesthetic objectivity. “The painting should look like the person. You didn’t hire someone to paint your portrait and when finished, it doesn’t look like you. It should look and feel like you, and on top of that, it should be a good painting.”
Glenn grew up around art. In the Long Island home where he grew up, art was a part of life. His father painted and so did the seven children growing up in the Harrington house. He describes his father as “a very playful Irish guy—very smart and a good story teller.” Although he earned his living as an ironworker, his love was painting. With a smile Glenn recalls how his father painted a large mural on a wall in the house and how his mother posed to be a fountain in the middle of it.
As a child, Glenn also loved magazines and books for their illustrations. His parents gave him Time Life books, Life magazines and also took him on a yearly trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had formal art classes too and in High School was encouraged by his teachers to pursue painting.
Even before going to college at the Pratt Institute, Glenn found ways to earn money with his art. In high school Glenn had a sign painting business, did pinstriping on cars, drew political cartoons for a local gazette and did murals on motorcycle tanks and vans.
At Pratt while learning to be an illustrator, Glenn continued to turn his talent into gainful work. “In college you are exposed to the whole world of publishing, the world of advertising and the world of art. I spent a lot of time in museums and I knew that I was going to do art in some more serious manner at some point in my life, but I wanted freedom. I worked for a magazine.” In 1978 at the age of 18 Glenn worked for the classic science fiction magazine, Heavy Metal.
Out of college Glenn’s illustrations took him to the top of his field. It was the 1980s that door after door opened to young Glenn Harrington. At the time and to this day he loved and studied the works of John Singer Sargent, who was the portrait painter of his generation. “I loved his work, which technically was unsurpassed. I love his watercolors, his oils and his Italian landscapes. He started out as a portrait artist. His famous Madame X painting caused such a stir because he painted her with the strap to her dress hanging down below her bicep. He went to England and started doing portraits of people in the upper classes.” Glenn also loved Gilbert Stuart.
As he studied the great portrait artists, his illustrating career continued to take off. He did things like a painting of Bob Dylan and Bill Clinton for the back cover of MAD Magazine, and he was busy illustrating book covers for top New York publishers. It was his painterly style that his clients wanted. People knew that Glenn Harrington was not simply an illustrator. That’s why he painted over 700 book covers.
At age 22 Glenn was walking away from publishers with many book covers. His covers were on bestsellers by novelists Jack Higgins and Robert Littell. He also did classics, and right now, in fact, he is illustrating a very pictorial Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But as a young man Glenn was given large posters for movies. He worked for Sports Illustrated for a long time and has had a long association with the sport of golf and golfers. He was included along with great illustrators like Wyeth and Rockwell in the prestigious book, The Illustrator in America: 1860-2000, by Walt Reed.
In this very busy period of his life, Glenn, who also illustrated annual reports, suggested to his corporate clients that he do portraits of their top officers, CEOs, presidents, board chairmen and other corporate officials were painted by Glenn. These portraits, after being put in the annual reports, were given to the executives who often hung them on the walls of their offices. Work for Stroh Brewing Company also included portraits. An advertising campaign there included selling the signatures of famous people, who Glenn would paint.
Glenn insists there never really was a line that he could draw between his illustrations and his fine art. He always worked in oils, something unusual for illustrators. He painted in watercolors for a short period, but being an oil painter was part of who he is artistically. Just as the medium could not be separated from his art, neither could his illustrations be sharply differentiated from his fine art. “Society defines this difference, I never really did. The only difference between an illustrator and a fine artist is the desire to include your own interpretation on what you see. You’re no longer taking manuscripts or advertising ideas and illustrating someone else’s idea. When you illustrate your own ideas, that’s painting.”
Although Glenn is interested in all artists from the great masters of the past to abstract painters and conceptual artists, his own art is representational and yet it is creatively challenging. “I always like the idea of limits. Because life is so easy to be taken off path, let me say it this way. I like to use the example of Shakespeare and iambic pentameter because by being forced to stay within those limits, he finds new and beautiful ways of saying things. The same idea of self-limiting applies to painting within a rectangle. I’ve decided that this is how I’m going to paint and this how I’m going to constrain myself. It is within those confines that I have an unlimited ability to express ideas and feelings about people and landscapes.”
Portraits come from perspective. Glenn says, “The face is the only part of a person you can pick out in a crowd. You can’t necessarily pick out people by their hands. God designed us in such a way that we recognize each other immediately. Yet we all have two eyes, two ears, nostrils and so on. There are so many variations—of one shape and all these different cultures, different skin tones, different hair—all this variety.” So people come in for a portrait, and according to Glenn they do not realize that there is not one view of their face. “They don’t realize their face is all over the place so I have to go through all this reference material just to find a image that really represents that person honestly.
Good portraits require an intense study of the person from different angles and in different light. Glenn likens it to when he does a poster for a movie. There is all this film with all these different frames, but one image from this film is going to be the poster and it’s going to tell people what this film is about. Glenn says, “I would call this the iconic image, and that’s what I am looking for in a portrait painting.”
To get an iconic portrait, Glenn has to study the person from a variety of angles. “Whenever I do a portrait on anyone I will make sketches or photographs or both of the subject at different angles. Sometimes Ill find a beautiful expression in a piece of reference but the light is wrong. Then I’ll be able to go back to a profile and say, ‘Oh that’s what her nose look like and so on.’”
Glenn remembers a doctor and his wife in Columbia, South Carolina asked him to paint their daughter. So Glenn spent the night with the family because he wanted to see her in the context where she could be herself. “She was going away to school next year and she was the their only daughter, and they wanted to document the time they had together, which you don’t see, everyday. There is something about a portrait that is true. It represents somebody, says something positive and it goes up on a wall. Then it becomes a two-dimensional member of the family and you see it everyday. And that’s they wanted me to produce for them and that’s what I did. I spent enough time with them and their daughter to see what she was really like.”
Lighting is very important to the process of portrait painting. “If the lighting is from too many different directions all the form falls away. To me portraits should be lit like planets and have single light source, and that way it shows the most form.”
Lighting, angles and so on are all technical prerequisites to painting a good portrait, but a good portrait comes from more than technique. The painter using color and light and must go beyond mere technicality. The subject suggests something that is beyond mere shadow and form. To Glenn, a man of faith, human beings are spiritual creatures, made in God’s image and likeness. The painter needs to capture this and go beyond his technical skill. This is art. And this is what Glenn does best.
Glenn Harrington has exhibited his fine art portraits and landscapes in New York, Japan, London, South Carolina and Pennsylvania. His paintings over the last several years have been viewed at the James A. Michener Museum, the Norman Rockwell Museum, the Museum of American Illustration, the USGA Museum, the Gibbs Museum and the Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison College in Florida. He has won numerous awards from the Portrait Society of America, Oil Painters of America, Society of Illustrators and many more from societies, Museums, and shows. Glenn paints portraits on commission, which include families, children, individuals, artists, judges, golfers and babies. Glenn Harrington studio is open to collectors and for commissions by appointment. Visit Glenn online at www.glennharrington.com. For more information, you can email Glenn at glennharringtonstudio@gmail.com or call 610-294-8104.
Bob Waite is the editor of Bucks County Magazine and MONTCO Homes, Gardens & Lifestyle.