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HAROLD “HAL” E. LARSEN (1934 - ) was born in Gowen, Michigan in 1934 and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico to paint. His primary medium is acrylic on canvas or paper. His primary material, he will tell you, is “feelings”. Rather than depicting the world in a literal way, he says, “my work is about my feelings about the world.” Harold Larsen places himself squarely in the great Romantic tradition, and we hear an echo of Wordsworth’s dictum that good art arises from the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions. To be sure, emotions are a persistent theme in Larsen’s work. But these emotions are never simply vented or unleashed upon the canvas. Instead, Larsen allows color, form and line to accumulate gradually, often layer upon layer. We are given a sense of inner exploration and discovery rather than eruption.
Even when one mood or thought seems to dominate the surface, there is always the suggestion of much more lying underneath, hints of things half-buried, half-awakening, a mix of memory and desire, sometimes, quiescent, sometimes almost playful. In both subject and technique, Larsen shows strong affinities to major Abstract Expressionists and their precursors (he has a special affection for the Fauves). Equally profound influences can be found in the physical environment of Santa Fe, where Larsen has lived and painted for nearly 30 years. Even at his most abstract, he gives us unmistakable glimpses of northern New Mexico’s gorgeous light and air, its vast spaces and expanses of color, its sensuous curves and its sudden angularities. Harold Larsen’s work is represented in international, national and regional museums, as well as in notable private and corporate collections. It has been the subject of articles and chapters in a variety of arts publications over the past three decades.
Larsen family’s paintings created from desert’s colors, light
By Nisha Pulliam (Palm Beach Post Staff Writer) — The Palm Beach Post, Feb. 13, 1988.
Looking for a change of scenery? Go to the Hobe Sound Gallery to take in an exhibit of geological landscapes, paintings and pottery by a husband, wife and daughter team.
Hal, Fran and Kristen Larsen moved to New Mexico in 1976 for the very same reason – a change in scenery – and they haven’t tired of the desert and its Indian inhabitants yet.
It influences their work, though each has a distinct style.
“The land is so vast. I couldn’t contain it all in one piece,” said Hal Larsen, who puts his landscapes on triptychs. “Three pannels seemed so appropriate.”
“Ever since college I was intereseted in meso-American Indian cultures... this thing that happened in America,” his wife, Fran, said. “That’s why we moved to New Mexico in 1976. It’s something that is part of the spirituality of the area.”
“... I was doing architectural detail drawings in black and white and, at one time, Fran said she wouldn’t paint it if it didn’t go with brown,” Larsen said and laughed. “Now both of us have become colorists.”
The Larsens’ daughter, Kristen, a former Miss New Mexico, is a potter. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe during a summer session, the only time the school is open to non-Indians.
What makes the desert so special, artistically? [...]
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1934 - (90 years)
. Kristen Ann LARSEN, b. 8 Sep 1960, South Haven, Van Buren, Michigan 
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