Reviews
“My first impression of John Harland’s paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford is of early Hockney but with bolder colour. Like Hockney’s pop art paintings of the 1960’s Harland exploits the visual rhetoric of graffiti. The graffiti in these works seems childlike, lending them a naive air. To the artist they are abstract memories in which he repeats motifs in vivid and vibrant colours.”
-The Royal Academy Magazine
“One who has been described as ‘a painter’s painter’, while such a label may set him apart and suggest that his paintings are going to be difficult to come to terms with, if not impossible to interpret, they are in fact, quite delightful and can be read in any way the viewer wishes. Something of a voyage of discovery for the artist this exhibition revolves around and refers to his memories. Fortunately, for the most part, they are pleasant but just as memories will come to mind when least expected so the images that first invade his mind and then his canvases pop up here, there and everywhere. They may be random but they are under firm control…yet while these paintings may be childlike, they have been made by an artist who could hardly be more mature or more aware of what he is doing. Animated and amusing, paintings that take you back to one’s early years, that make you think and then think again, and that are definitely worth seeing.”
-Frank Ruhrmund