The Listening Station, acrylic on canvas 2015, 28” X 42”.
The Listening Station really spoke to me the first time I saw it at IlluxCon. It was so unlike anything Neil and I owned but I kept on finding myself staring at it. The same happened at a subsequent show a couple of years later but I never did anything about it. When John set up at 2018's IX show, he hadn’t brought it and I found myself surprisingly disappointed. That got me thinking that maybe it should be mine. I emailed John & Alison post-show asking if the painting was still available and they said it was. I think John knew how much it called to me as Alison made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
This piece has always haunted me in a good way. It seems to evoke a multitude of feelings and impressions for me and I find it difficult to verbalize them well. Sometimes I feel that it represents a stoic resolve tinged with an air of desperation, waiting for a message that likely will never come but waiting none the less. Other times I see the weight and magnitude of the station as a sleeping giant which might waken at any moment. In discussing the piece together, John was kind enough to share his feelings on the painting:
"This piece has a special place in my mind, as an expression of a particular mood associated with 'listening'... The way this was painted, producing layers of detail which were deliberately obscured with successive layers of refined tonality, was my attempt to trigger in the viewer, the sense of following a fading signal, much like the ringing of a Tibetan bell, causing in us a corresponding quiet. I cannot know how effective this is with any particular viewer, but it had that result with me, as I was painting it."
John Harris 2019.
While the photograph of the painting is entirely faithful to the original, the piece really needs to be seen in the flesh to truly appreciate the emotions it evokes.
