News & Events 2005-2006

Artwork by Harry Naar on Exhibit at Blair

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An artist’s reception for Harry Naar’s work, currently on exhibit at Blair, took place on September 22 in the Romano Gallery of the Armstrong-Hipkins Center for the Arts. The show runs until October 1.

Harry I. Naar is a professor of art and the director of the Rider University Art Gallery, where he has taught both studio art and art history for over 25 years. This selection of his drawings and watercolors reflects his personal observations of nature and life.

Naar, who received his B.F.A. from Philadelphia College of Art and his M.F.A. from Indiana University, is listed in “Who’s Who in American Art.” His works have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the country and abroad. His art is also included in many public and private collections.

According to Naar, “Creating drawings and watercolors has for many years been an important part of my creative process, almost like note-taking. I originally approached the process as an adjunct to the development of ideas that related to larger paintings. At a particular point in my development, I recognized that these two forms of recording created images that were no longer notes but fully realized pictorializations that could exist on
their own.”

He added, “The drawings and watercolors selected for this exhibition come from personal involvement. They were developed from the experience of direct observation from nature – what I see in the world around me – as well as invention, psychological ideas derived from invented and memory experiences. Both my drawings and watercolors are about how the purity of a mark or color can relate to nature and the observed world, and, at the same time, how these same marks and colors can be appreciated for their intrinsic abstract beauty – how marks and colors created and placed a particular way can reveal to us new ideas about seeing.”

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