Her Inspirations

Doris Harris’s uninhibited use of color reflects a strong influence of the Fauves, the “Wild Beasts” of the early 20th Century. Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Maurice Vlaminck (1876-1958), and Andre Derain (1880-1954) were the major painters of this movement that extended the symbolic, expressionistic color of Gauguin and Van Gogh by completely freeing color from its traditional role of describing the natural appearance of an object. By using color as an independent, expressive element, Doris displays the same exhuberance and vitality as the innovative Fauves. Her delight in the raw sensation of color in this series of Italian landscape paintings conveys a voluptuous sense of richness and earthy dynamism. Her colors become charges of dynamite, explosive and emotional, linking her closely with the attempts of the Fauves to “raise paintings above the real.” As she saturates each canvas with brilliant, intense color she reestablishes her link with the past while stepping boldly into the expressionistic world of contemporary painting.