10/02/2024
Oh, the success you'll achieve by becoming an artist resident in Iceland.
Governor Pritzker and Joshua Davis-Ruperto, Executive Director of the lllinois Arts Council, just awarded William Harroff a Creative Catalyst Grant of $6,500 to produce a 4-book hardback series of prints featuring morning glory flowers from his Edwardsville home. Harroff’s floral artwork is already part of major museum collections and has been featured on St. Louis television several times.
He and his wife, Charlotte Johnson, recently completed their second month-long art residency at the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland. While there, Harroff began creating his morning glory vector drawings.
As Harroff stated, “I was tired and angry when we arrived at our Icelandic art residency this year because of the divisive pre-election stories repeatedly broadcast by the media outlets. I began creating a new body of work, American Glory, symbolizing the red vs. blue chasm using my home-grown morning glories.
I have precious childhood memories of Mom’s rows of heart-shaped vines growing up the side of our garage, creating a bouquet of Heavenly Blues against the clear northern Indiana sky. There is an inner glow to a glory which acts as a beacon to pollinators, but is also reminiscent of stars glowing at night. The life cycle of the morning glory symbolizes our lives; each of us, vine-tied together, emerge as uniquely created beings who flower for a brief moment and are then gone.
I decided to use vector drawings to create these new images. Vectors are digital graphics made up of geometrical shapes, paths and curves. When an artist places complementary colors of the same value together, like red and blue, a visual tension is created. To me, this is emblematic of the constant stress underlying nearly every interaction in American society today.”
By early in 2025, Harroff hopes to have printed and published the book series. He is soliciting Illinois libraries, galleries, museums and art centers about possible exhibits of the new work.
