Member Profiles

The watercolourist, art tutor in Adult Education and television researcher/television producer Pat Harvey may best be described as an "evangelical Cocteau", after the multi-faceted twentieth-century French painter, poet and film director, Jean Cocteau.

As a watercolourist Pat specialises in urban, French and floral subjects. These watercolours hover at the borders of fantasy and reality.She has exhibited widely, including at Battersea Contemporary Art Fair, Brighton Festival and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour, and her work is in collections in France, Sweden, the US and the Middle East. Like the artists she admires (Mary Fedden, Paul Nash, Winifred Nicholson, Mary Potter and Eric Ravilious) she aims to invest everyday subjects with an air of the extraordinary.

Her paintings of carnations in tin cans, butterfly-shaped gates on Camberwell Green, a rock-chick near the solemn statue of William Tyndale in London’s Embankment Gardens, a sinister stilt-man in a Normandy market or lovers in a Parisian park have the understated poetry of French cinema. Representational but with a dash of surrealism, they are miniature explosions of colour and light.

With a natural talent for painting, Pat also looked for means of expressing ideas through film and television, first as a film editor, and later by presenting her own ideas for programmes. Her successes include Arena and the South Bank Show, ranging from the French director, Marcel Carne, to the French Chanson, starring Juliette Greco and Charles Aznavour, and archive research on an Edith Piaf documentary for an independent company working for BBC2 and 4 via BBC Wales. There has also been corporate work on highly technical subjects for The Big Yellow Feet Company (2007).

Artists often find difficulty in organizing and marketing their work. In 2006 Pat was approached by Sussex Business Link, a government-sponsored organisation dedicated to assisting small businesses. A consultant has visited her every twelve months to help her organise her work, build an effective timetable, and give direction to her efforts. Pat cannot speak too highly of this assistance.

She now paints in three categories: ’marketable’ paintings on French themes, often turned into inexpensive prints (eg Quai de Bercy, Moulin Rouge, Café de Flore, Patisserie and 2CV, and the best-selling Bicyclettes de Bastille); illustrations for book-jackets (eg for a WW2 novel to be published Autumn 2008) and CD booklets, and creative paintings irrespective of the market (The Great British Takeaway). She reviews art exhibitions for Third Way (Cezanne, Francis Bacon, The Camden Town Group), and maintains close links with several independent television production companies with whom she is developing her own ’slate’ of proposals: A Power of Good (drama series about the Christian roots of public service); Watercolour - A Very British Art; and a DVD for visitors to lighthouses.

See the following websites for samples of Pat’s work: www.sgfa.org.uk and www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery

When asked about her contact with the ACG, Pat commented: ’Born in 1942 to a literary father and an artistic mother I became an evangelical Christian at the age of seventeen and was shattered by the Philistinism of the churches. A black hole ensued. In God’s providence L’Abri Fellowship introduced me to the teachings of Francis Schaeffer which showed that within the Christian scheme of things there must be a Creation Theology. The logical sequel of this was the Arts Centre Group’. A long-time ACG member, Pat forged friendships which grew naturally out of the unique ACG soil of being ’thoroughly Christian and thoroughly professional’, friendships which she still treasures today. In 1998 Pat Harvey founded a West Sussex branch of ACG with the intriguing name of The Lighthouse Café Club, now celebrating its tenth anniversary.

 

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