ARTIST PROFILE: Bill Harrison

Every picture tells a story. Just as a writer reconstructs life through narrative, an artist tells his stories by interpreting life through lines, brushstrokes and textures.

- Jeff Nedwick

In that sense, a Bill Harrison portrait is like a classic novel. The subject matter is felt more than seen; hidden in plain sight between the smudges, lines and dots made by his Wolff carbon pencil. Viewers of a Harrison portrait don’t just see a hunting dog; they feel an adrenaline rush through the dog’s eyes as a grouse bursts from an aspen stand.

Harrison describes his depictions of hunting dogs and wildlife as “realistic, but not photo-realistic; expressive, but not self-expressive.

“My fascination with art has always been with the process of making something look like I want it to look, not with conveying any kind of message or self-expression,” he says. “I don’t have anything balled up inside of me looking for a way to express itself. I just like the technical challenge of art.”

Even the most realistic photographs can’t match the intensity of a great realistic drawing because photographs are limited to what the camera lens sees. With his pencil, Harrison transcends such limitations, bending reality to suit his purpose.

The Wolff carbon pencil preferred by Harrison combines the sharp lines of a graphite pencil with the rich, black lines of a charcoal pencil. When he draws the pencil across 300-pound hot press paper — heavily textured paper with a thickness between heavy cardboard and light poster board — tiny white spots appear where the pencil doesn’t reach fully into the paper’s tiny pocks and crevasses. Harrison painstakingly goes back and fills in some of those spots to achieve the desired texture and precise level of detail.