Atmospheric Art: Revealing the Island’s Inner Light
By Marya Mann
From the searing cauldron of Kīlauea Volcano to the cool surfing waves of Waipi‘o Valley and the breathtaking summits of Hualālai and Mauna Kea, he had space to stretch out and explore all the edges, opposites and contrasts of life. He took time to smell the woody scents of red, yellow and orange lehua blossoms, finding it thrilling to replicate nature’s creative genius.
He explored extremes of high and low, narrow and wide, light and dark, before coming home to find a true center, the perfect balance in the middle range between the extremes. He might enjoy free-diving to 60 ft. below sea level one day, then hike up to the high mountain range for hunting wild pig the next morning at dawn.
He still does. Hawai‘i Island artist Harry Wishard is fascinated by every atmosphere on these island microcosms.
“Locality most probably molds the type or style of art one does,” Wishard observes. “Mine is quite realistic, and people are often enamored by my attention to detail, but it’s more of a device to give a painting credibility, rather than what the piece is really about.” It’s only the doorway.
“Realism accommodates viewers,” he points out. “It helps them ‘enter’ a painting. Growing up here has given me the knowledge of how things are supposed to look so that they can be accurately depicted. Technique attaches someone to a piece, but it is not the purpose of the painting. What matters—the real message—is the feeling or emotion evoked.
“Emotion may be the wrong word but if you look at the painting and you feel its warmth and sticky salt spray on your face, it gives credibility; it’s easier for you to enter the painting.”
From his mountain ranch outside Waimea where he paints, Wishard can see the Kohala Coast, ‘Alenuihāhā Channel, and on clear days, the peaks and caldera of Maui’s Haleakalā Volcano.
The vista is broad, spectacular and spine-tingling. In contrast, the painter’s studio is small, disciplined and tightly focused.
Pungent aromas of turpentine and linseed oil fill the air in the simple, 20 x 30 ft. wooden structure. Family and historical memorabilia—including an old black wall phone like the ones used in “ditch shacks” during Pāhala’s plantation era—embellish the paneling and shelves. This humble workspace, incredibly, gives birth to the glowing panoramas that Wishard paints with staggering delicacy.
He has 20 or 30 paintings in process at any given time, and he produces five paintings per month, down from his previous output of more than 70 paintings per year.
At 59, Harry still exudes the innocent wonder and enthusiasm that must have led his uncle, acclaimed 20th century artist Leo Lloyd Sexton, Jr., to take his nephew under his wing 50 years ago. Sexton, born in Hilo in 1912, was a second-generation Volcano School painter, whose floral paintings, landscapes and portraits earned him repeated exhibits at the Royal Academy in London and around the world.
“He got me all set up with my own little painting palette and brushes,” says Harry. “We had a little beach house in Puako, and he would come up there in summer. He used to let me sit behind him, and I’d be very quiet and I would copy whatever he did.”
Sexton showed Wishard everything he could about becoming an artist. In fact, it was Wishard’s sole, formal art education. A portrait by Sexton of Harry Wishard’s grandfather, Leslie Wishard, hangs beside Harry as he draws at his easel on polyflax canvas with Prismacolor charcoal pencils, followed by layers of pulsating color laid down with Grumbacher oil paints.
“It was funny,” the artist recalls. “He (Sexton) would say things that I would only really remember years later. He would say, like when he noticed I was doing something a bit too much, ‘I have a friend who does landscapes and sometimes he tries to get too much into it.’ Well, he was telling me, but I didn’t really hear it for 20 or 30 years—I was the one trying to cram too much into it.”
Today, a feeling of spaciousness is one of the signature qualities that make a Harry Wishard work so enticing. Airy and open, yet full of painstaking nuances, the mists come alive and move in harmony with cascading waterfalls in “Misty Falls.” They appear to have actual light emanating from them, such as the light rays emerging from the naupaka greenery and the white-fringed tops of sapphire and teal-colored waves in “Seaside Ranch” and “Afternoon Rays.”
Like Caravaggio and Rembrandt, Wishard is a master of chiaroscuro, a Latin word literally meaning “light dark,” denoting the skillful balance of light and dark in a painting, with strong contrasts to create moving, dramatic effects.
Wishard knowledgably represents every facet of tropical flora, fauna, weather and topography as well as farming life with astounding detail because he’s familiar with it. Born on the verdant slopes of Mauna Loa into a sugar plantation environment in Ka’ū, his keen senses were kindled by the unique range of ecosystems assembled on Hawai‘i Island.
“It was a great way to grow up,” remarks Harry. “Being a haole born in the ‘50s is not exactly rare, but uncommon. I did not realize it at the time, but as I look back, I grew up in a rather unique situation. My family had been involved in the sugar cane business for generations.”
Sugar plantations, like the rest of 1950s-era Hawai‘i, were tight melting pots of Japanese, Chinese, Caucasian, Filipino and other cultures, drawing people from all over the world and every economic class. The diversity of Hawai‘i Island plant zones and climates—from sky-piercing, snow-peaked mountains to humid rainforest and the water-drenched coastal reef—inspired Harry with the need to express the full breadth and depth of the natural world.
After his family moved to the mountain ranch outside Waimea, he expanded his horizons and discovered new visions, new ways of seeing. It was a rainbow world of unexpected contrasts, outdoor work and play, free-diving, surfing, family and farming.
“I love being on the beach early in the morning,” he writes in his artist’s statement. “First light, the cool but not cold morning air, the crisp clarity of the morning sky and the water, gin-clear, not yet rippled by mid-morning thermals. It is a refreshing, rejuvenating feeling—peaceful. So when I want to paint this feeling, I start out with a beach. Now, this beach may be in my imagination, or may really exist, but either way I’ll create a credible scene. Either I’ll represent the beach with enough accuracy to make it recognizable or I’ll depict it with such foliage and geographical characteristics that it may actually exist; hidden somewhere.”
If accepted by the viewer, he adds, it gives them the sense that they are actually emotionally experiencing what they are looking at visually. “They are there. If they can really feel their feet in the water or hear the small waves lapping at the shore, then I have done my job.”
With titles like “Naulu Rain,” “Afternoon Rains,” “After the Rain,” and “After the Mauka Rain,” multiple paintings of light and moisture shining through white clouds, Wishard repeats the theme of rain’s beauty, harmony and balance like a mantra. The full range of moment-to-moment variations, feelings and energies make each painting unique.
Wishard creates atmospheric paintings that distill and express an array of the moods and mysteries of Hawai‘i. The titles of Wishard paintings ground the truth that where we are right now is stunningly beautiful. They capture a moment in time and nature, yielding visual contentment and a total harmony with life as it is. They document the natural, visible world through total attention to detail, and through such intense involvement with what we see, the subject’s invisible essence is revealed. We move through the visible to find the invisible, finding that inside all material substance, there is an invisible essence, the unseen spirit or energy behind it.
In Hawai‘i, it is said that the hidden meaning is revealed when a person is ready. The Hawaiian word kaona—seeing behind the appearance into the hidden or true essence of a thing, person or word—opens up the poetry of it.
Wishard’s vision for a creative work, he explains, can begin anywhere. “Here’s this painting I’m working on. I was looking at a National Geographic. It was about summer in Russia. It reminded me of the old days. You see all these yards are really nice in the photo. There is always some old person working in it—like in Hilo. Not so many people do it anymore, except in places like Hilo, so that’s what I am going to do with it.
“First, I sketch the house, which has a feeling. I am going to have an old man sitting over here by the river. They just come to you.
“I put in the house first and then figure out where the horizon is going to be and where the light source is. In this painting, I think it’s going to be the upper right. Then I start adding everything else. This is going to be all dark by the riverbank.”
Wishard holds up a canvas and shows how he darkens an entire ravine and waterfall before he unwinds the light hidden inside the dark. “I rough it in, get all the white out of it. And I do it at an in-between color. In oil you work from dark to light,” he explains. “So it just gets darker and darker and at one point, it’s black.”
Then he starts bringing out the light, uncovering the massive landforms and tiny canoes, calm bays and turbulent clouds. Out of the darkness, like Michelangelo unearthing the sculpture hidden inside the raw stone, a core of soft light emerges. In Hawaiian tradition, too, out of pō, darkness, comes creation.
“When you start bringing out the light, the more and more you bring it up, the more depth you get. There is a little book in my gallery because everybody is asking how I do it. So we actually made a book of photos on the sequence. It’s interesting.”
When asked if this technique is very interesting for a painter, Harry quips, “I don’t know because I never went to school.”
Four years ago, in the middle of financial difficulty and an economic decline, Wishard again did the unexpected: He opened his own gallery in Waimea, a challenging time to open a new business.
His wholesale business had declined to less than 10 percent of what it had been. So he turned to retail, leasing a building and stocking it with his paintings.
Wishard Gallery Director Nancy Kramer had a lot to do with the gallery’s success, he says. Nancy, in her typically modest way, says, “It’s not that I am that great; it’s just that I am real careful with money.” Paintings sell for $2,000 to $9,000 for the originals and the giclée prices run from $800 to $1,200, and sometimes more: they’ve had some requests for huge reproductions “because they blow up well,” says Nancy.
At last, Harry has been able to balance his creative output with sustainable income. They are putting the finishing touches on a new gallery in the Queen’s Marketplace at Waikoloa, scheduled to open in the first week of September.
His biggest challenges today: raising his two children, ranching, breeding livestock and opening the new gallery.
Oh, and painting lips. His Uncle Lloyd Sexton began focusing more intently on painting portraits midway through his career, and Wishard is trying his hand at that too. “The galleries are always wanting more. I can hardly keep up,” he says.
Really seeing a Wishard painting makes it easy to accept that there can be as much pleasure and delight as we look for at any given moment; if we are willing to shine some light on something or someone that we love, to attempt to see the inner kaona, the light inside will turn on and shine back on us, as well as on others.
“It’s a gift,” says Harry. “So I don’t know what I am doing a lot of times.”
On the day the somewhat reclusive Harry Wishard opened his studio to a guest—something he rarely does—the landscape around his ranch glimmered with sunshine, mirroring the message of Wishard’s paintings: light is being reborn in every leaf, along every curve and on every branch and flower. Among the pu’u and hilltops, purple morning glories danced around elephantine, prickly pear cactus on slopes that sweep from the sky down to the sea.
Downslope, a rainbow appeared. Hawaiians recognize different types of the phenomena we know as “rainbows” and have many words to describe them. Na po makole, for example, is a “night rainbow,” a circular rainbow only appearing on the night of the full moon, harmonizing all available light around a fully-developed consciousness.
Wishard is a painter whose work spans Hawai‘i Island, and beyond, like the rainbow. He paints the spirit rainbows that shine through the mists of cultures, seasons and climates, bringing the conflicting forces of nature together into a new unity.
In his spartan studio high on the rugged sea cliffs, in a hale on the pali of Kohala Mountain, Harry Wishard paints to give us glimpses of these luminous rainbows known to only a few—until now, when, through his paintings, this island light can be shared with everyone. ❖
Visit Wishard Gallery at Parker Ranch Center in Waimea.
www.wishardgallery.com
808.887.2278
Resources:
Leo Lloyd Sexton, Jr.
References:
www.isaacsartcenter.hpa.edu
Forbes, David W., Encounters with Paradise: Views of Hawai‘i and its People, 1778-1941, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1992, 213-265.
Yoshihara, Lisa A., Collective Visions, 1967-1997, Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, 1997, 39.
Contact the writer: Marya@LoomOfLove.com
