My art is process oriented. I work in series with oil paint on canvas, paper, mylar, metal and other surfaces. I begin with inspiration from landscape and sound, structure and chaos. Shapes float on top of other structures. Structures build on top of one another in layers creating veils. Veils become translucent and reveal hints of past forms and color. Colors blend and obscure, reflect and transmit to become form again. The process becomes the art, as the art is the process...
My paintings are a cycle of elements as they interplay with one another and myself over time. The interplay has movement and motion with inter weavings of the elements that inspire me for the next painting.
Kay Harvey 2015
"John’s Baldessari’s instructional aphorism that you “learn to make art by making art” is true for the art practice of all four artists in “Coloring Outside the Lines”. It is especially true for Kay Harvey. Kay has, for several decades, followed her own drummer. Her ceramic sculpture in “Coloring Outside the Lines” sums up decades of her art journey.
Although Harvey has worked in various forms her natural inclination is towards the freedom and improvisation of abstract expressionism. A trip to Antarctica and it’s mystical minimal landscape turned her toward minimalism and Kay returned to make a series of elegant mono-prints that took advantage of years of layering oil paints to subtly layer the mono-print inks to produce deep rich colors for sky, sea and the massive ice fragments that had broken away from the land mass to drift silently through the polar sea. In this world abstraction and landscape meet and Harvey used torn paper fragments in the monoprint process to capture the abstract shapes of these drifting ice islands.
Simultaneously Kay continued to paint and make ceramics. The torn paper fragments led to a series of torn paper collage works exhibited at 333 in 2013 where Harvey used torn paper much as she used an oil paint brush stroke adding a sculptural third dimension to the collage form. Those torn paper assemblage works suggested open sculptural forms while her ceramic works began to peel open the vessel form.
With this new series of ceramic sculptures Kay has pushed her tendencies from the various mediums into a very original hybrid form. Harvey has completely torn apart the vessel form, then fired these torn slab fragments with exuberant color on both sides, interlocked the resulting shards in an embrace of balance to make contemporary ceramic sculptures that combine the freedom of abstract expressionist improvisational painting with an assemblage form that turns the vessel inside out and every which way. The almost crazy use of color, that is both sophisticated and child like, matches perfectly the skewed architectural balance of the sculptural assemblage. "
- Tom Tavelli Coloring Outside The Lines, 2015