about my arT

C.M. Harvey - Artist!

That's right. In a case of personal history repeating itself this former art teacher-turned-musician has decided to revisit the art world after Quite A Long Time. Why? It seems my penchant for creating surrealism and humour in song, as purveyed particularly in my years with Roaring Jelly and The Omega 3, has leaked over into the world of visual arts.

It started - by accident - with photography, not that I'm a particularly sophisticated or skilled photographer (unlike my son Jackson). But I discovered recently that by editing and manipulating photos, sometimes combined with digital graphics, I was able to create visual versions of the rather bizarre ideas that previously might have emerged in my songs. You might be surprised to learn, however, that I don't use Photoshop, nor any specialist digital art software. I simply use the built-in facilities on my iMac. The photographic images are mostly extracted from my own photos or from free images available on the internet. Other shapes and backgrounds I create using my bog-standard Apple apps. Works for me.

The photo/digital art genre used to be considered "fake", and still is by some purists, despite precedents set by notables such as Man Ray, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Also one of the world's greatest living artists, David Hockney, is now famously producing fabulous art digitally, and this provides an excuse for me to use the name C.M. Harvey in the same sentence - haha! I can claim a slightly less tenuous link: Stan Peskett, a friend of Hockney's and a respected artist in his own right, was my first personal tutor at art college and, like me, is also a musician.

If I get into this seriously, of course, I'll have to look into the new world of crypto art, with a vocabulary that's currently alien to me: blockchains, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), Ethereum, CryptoPunks... Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, has suddenly become one of the world's most successful living artists in this new art marketplace. Mind you, having recently learnt how eco-unfriendly and unstable the whole crypto world is... maybe I won't bother.

When wearing my artist's hat I'll be calling myself C.M. Harvey. I just like the sound of it. This page displays a few examples of my artwork. When I've decided what to do with it that will be announced here too. Whether it's considered "fake" or not doesn't bother me in the least, just as it never bothered Ray, Richter, Warhol or Hockney. It certainly isn't bothering Beeple. And after all - What Is Art?