Originally from Hampshire, Harry moved to Bristol to study and has hung around Somerset ever since; unfashionably honest (he has an instinctive mistrust of ‘high art’ and all the BS that comes with it) he quotes Hockney, George Herriman and Beatrix Potter as influences.
His cast of cool, unknowable, vaguely sinister anthropomorphic animals rest deep in our consciousness at a time when the only animals many of us see are urban foxes scrounging through bins.
By reclaiming these icons and reinventing them, Harry’s work breathes new life into old friends and makes us regard them with fresh eyes. Cute? Maybe, but they’re rarely cuddly: he has badgers carrying shotguns, red-jacketed foxes, anarchist hares and squirrels touting what look suspiciously like Walther PPKs.
While Harry’s current Happy Year series has been compared to the work of Beatrix Potter much of his work retains an edge. Beatrix Potter maybe, but with something of the Stanley Kubrick about it ?
His work with screen printing gurus Screen One (Banksy, China Mike, Nick Walker, Sick Boy etc.), has been described variously as ‘Bucolic Street Art’ and ‘Potter meets Tarantino’ – a reclusive country cousin of the Bristol art scene..? Not really – Harry is hard to pigeonhole, he lets his characters do the talking.