THE ARTIST WHO PAINTS STRIPES
HARRY MC
British artist Harry MC is among the leading contemporary stripe painters working today, creating large-scale striped abstract paintings from his Bath studio. His long-running fieldwork in Provence researches how vertical bands of colour capture the movement of light across architecture, landscape and everyday life. He has developed his own form of linear abstraction, testing how far light and place can be held in paint – built slowly, one stripe at a time.
HARRY MC AND THE GEOMETRY OF COLOUR
​This year’s studio work has been shaped by a series of research trips across Provence — from the art installations of Château La Coste to the quiet streets of Lacoste and the recently reopened rooms of Van Gogh’s hospital at Saint-Rémy. The experience has filtered back into the Bath studio as a new body of stripe paintings where the southern light of France meets the measured calm of the Georgian city. It’s the same question that runs through all of Harry’s work, how colour behaves when it’s given structure. In these recent canvases, the geometry holds steady while the rhythm of light keeps shifting, turning travel into memory and memory into paint. (Scroll down for paintings, photographs, and field notes from Provence.)
Provence has long been one of Harry’s quiet sources of material as well as inspiration. During his visits to the ochre region around Roussillon, he often picks up naturally sourced pigments from the old quarries, colours that hold the warmth and geology of the landscape. Back in the Bath studio, these ochres are mixed into his own mediums and folded into the stripe paintings, creating those dry-edged yellows and earthy tones that carry a trace of the south. For Harry, using these pigments is a way of keeping the work tied to place, letting the landscape echo through the paint long after the trip has ended. Between the Bath studio and regular trips to Provence, Harry builds stripe paintings from walks, photographs and pigment experiments in the South of France. See more on the Provence Fieldwork page.
Château La Coste, Provence — Damien Hirst’s monumental sculpture The Light That Shines overlooking the lake. A study in reflection and geometry that mirrors the light-driven rhythm of Harry MC’s stripe paintings.
New works - 'LANDSCAPES OF PROVENCE' by Harry MC.
A double take in Provence, contemporary artist Harry MC visits Château La Coste and the hill-top village of Lacoste, tracing connections between art, architecture and light, themes that continue to shape the colour and geometry of his striped abstract paintings.
In Landscapes of Provence, Harry MC invites us on a sensory journey to the sunlit landscapes of southern France. These works, at once minimalist and evocative, distill the artist’s experience of Provence into vertical bands of colour—each stripe is a memory, a story, inspired by the region’s luminous light, the vineyards, the olive groves and ancient hilltop villages. The series translates the soul of Provence into a rhythmic interplay of tone, texture, and vibrancy. It transcends traditional representation, capturing not what Provence looks like, but what it feels like. The bold yet harmonious palette speaks of terracotta rooftops warmed by the sun, lavender fields and glasses of the local rosé.
But this is not merely a celebration of the physical landscape, Harry's experience of the Provence lifestyle, the easy conviviality of those who live there, the market-days, the unhurried afternoons, ingrains these paintings with a meditative quality. Each stripe becomes the essence of this timeless region, from the earthy reds of the soil to the unbroken blues of the Mediterranean sky. With Landscapes of Provence, Harry MC merges abstraction with deep emotional resonance, creating a collection that invites viewers to linger, remember, and perhaps even visit Provence and experience it for themselves.
Harry explored the Luberon region and was particularly inspired by the landscape around the villages of Menerbes, Oppede and Lacoste. The latter is an enchanting creative enclave, an understated, perfectly preserved medieval village and the former home of fashion designer Pierre Cardin.
Landscapes of Provence No1. Oil and pigment on canvas, 39 inches x 39 inches.
When in Provence recently Harry was delighted to accept a special invitation to visit CHÂTEAU LA COSTE and take a tour of the vineyard and view it's many monumental sculptures, including this work by Sean Scully from 2007 - Wall of Light Cubed. Among the vines Scully’s stone sculpture turns his painted stripes into architecture and shadow. Its rhythm of light and mass echoes the balance of colour and geometry that continues to inspire Harry MC’s own striped paintings.
Contemporary artist Harry MC was invited to Château La Coste near Aix-en-Provence, an inspiring Provence landscape set amongst vineyards where art, architecture and light meet.
Among monumental sculptures by the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra and Sean Scully, Harry spent time exploring how colour, geometry and rhythm shape the experience of place. The visit continues his search to translate the movement of light across architecture and landscape into his distinctive striped abstract paintings, as outlined in his upcoming book.
The latest exhibition of Harry MC’s large-scale, multi-coloured striped paintings marks a profound exploration of abstraction, space, and time. A testament to the artist’s vision honed over nearly five decades. These pieces expand on his foundational exploration of the stripe as both a formal element and a narrative device. With the invigorated sense of urgency and lyricism in these new works, the stripe becomes more than a visual motif, it’s a metaphor for the complexities of modern existence. At first glance, the canvases are undeniably fields of vibrant stripes, arranged with the precision of a scientific diagram yet pulsing with the dynamism of a street artist's spray can. The paintings hold the viewer’s gaze with an almost magnetic force.
Landscapes of Provence No 6. Oil and pigment on canvas, 48 inches x 72 inches.
​Harry MC adopts an improvisational approach where each stripe is laid with a measured spontaneity. In these works the stripe can be seen as an existential metaphor. The individual line, straightforward and unyielding, juxtaposed against the unpredictable nature of life itself. Thick and thin, bright and muted they are not just formal elements but reflections of the emotional undulations of life rendered in colour.
The signature use of vivid, almost electric hues brings an added layer of meaning to the compositions. The colours are not merely decorative, but pulse with psychological weight. The bright yellows and acid greens vibrate with an almost painful intensity, while deep blues and scarlets invoke a sense of both tranquillity and urgency. These paintings demand to be experienced in person, as the sheer size of the canvases forces the viewer into an intimate relationship with the artwork. The scale amplifies the effect of the stripes, each one intensifying the emotional and psychological experience of being in the presence of the work. The viewer is not merely looking at the painting; they are enveloped by it, consumed by its vibrant energy.
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Harry once again demonstrates his unparalleled ability to transcend the limitations of his medium. The stripe, often dismissed as a simple graphic device has evolved into a profound symbol of the contradictions and complexities of the human condition. He reminds us that even within the most structured and seemingly simplistic forms there exists an endless potential for depth, meaning, and transformation. The stripes are not just colours on a canvas they are lines that trace the very fabric of life.
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Landscapes of Provence No.3. Oil and pigment on canvas, 39 inches x 39 inches.
Harry MC feels very at home amongst fellow creatives in the beautiful village of Lacoste in Provence. ( Not to be confused with the other creative hub and vineyard, Chateau La Coste, some 25 miles further south, towards Aix en Provence).
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Lacoste is an enchanting creative enclave, a beautifully preserved medieval village with sweeping views and a quietly magnetic charm. But it’s more than another pretty Provençal hilltop. The village is home to the Savannah College of Art and Design’s European campus and to the late Pierre Cardin’s château and summer arts festival. Between them, they’ve restored around seventy buildings, giving the place an immaculate, almost curated feel, the village itself feels like a work of art.
Harry MC discovered Lacoste by chance, taking a shortcut from Bonnieux to Ménerbes, expecting just another photogenic hamlet. Then he spotted the sign for SCAD and thought, why not stop? Fortune smiled, a friendly student offered him a personal tour and shared the story of how the American university came to settle there.
That alone would have made his day, but as Harry wandered higher through the cobbled lanes, he came upon Pierre Cardin’s château, the former home of the Marquis de Sade. Closed to the public that day, it looked magnificent even from the gates. Admiring the sculptures in the gardens, he struck up a conversation with the gardener who, on realising he was speaking to the artist Harry MC, promptly invited him inside. Moments later, Harry found himself face-to-trunk with a giant pink elephant sculpture.
For those less lucky, the château does open to visitors in summer, when Cardin’s long-running festival transforms its old quarries into open-air stages for theatre, dance and opera, celebrating young performers at the start of their careers.
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The village of Lacoste, once home to the revolutionary and all-round bad boy Marquis de Sade, has long provided a majestic setting, the purity of light appreciated by inspired creative visionaries. Over the past 20 years SCAD Lacoste has served as the American college’s flagship European residential study abroad program, offering a “premier educational experience” to SCAD students from an array of creative degree programs, such as architecture, art history, interior design, painting and film. Harry thought to himself if only the RCA had such a place back in the day.
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Restored former dwellings and medieval caves have been re-purposed into cutting-edge contemporary spaces - library, studios, classrooms, galleries, theatres, and residences. Notable restorations include the Residence du SCAD, the university’s guest house and the former boulangerie which is now a social centre. The shop, previously the studio of American painter Bernard Pfriem, has been converted into a gallery and boutique offering work by SCAD’s creatives. Also restored is La Maison Basse, a 16th century farmhouse with an illustrious history, once a gambling den of the Marquis de Sade.
Landscapes of Provence No.4. Oil and pigment on canvas, 72 inches x 72 inches.
Stripes, guitars and painted songs
Harry has always liked the moment where music spills over into paint. Long before the Bath studio became home, he spent time with a gallery who also sold art by celebrity artists such as Ronnie Wood. Many art collectors only knew Ronnie as a Rolling Stone and were amazed when they saw his work. Those Ronnie Wood exhibitions, prints, drawings and paintings, revealed a parallel career on canvas: portraits of bandmates, friends and heroes, all pulled out of the same hand that plays the guitar. The new Rolling Stones inspired hard -edged stripe painting on this page is Harry’s nod back to that world, a tall neck of colour built from stage black, tongue red, burnt orange and denim blue, as if the lights from a stadium show have been laid down in bands.
Bob Dylan sits nearby in Harry’s mental catalogue. Away from the records, Dylan has quietly built a substantial body of paintings and drawings – streets, bars, railway tracks and motel rooms, many of which Harry has seen first-hand and photographed at exhibitions. Those Bob Dylan paintings are full of roads, telegraph wires and window frames, the kind of linear structures that naturally fall into stripes and grids. They echo the way songs are written on staff lines and recorded on long dark bands of tape. Harry’s stripe paintings take that same sense of rhythm and sequence and translate it into pure colour: bars, beats and pauses written as vertical bands. For Harry, these connections are less about celebrity and more about structure. Ronnie Wood’s guitars, Dylan’s roads and Harry’s own canvases all share the same skeleton of repeated lines and measured intervals. The stripes on this website are simply where that shared rhythm ends up, a place where painted songs, stage lights and Bath studio walls all run side by side
Top: Exhibition in Provence of original paintings by Bob Dylan. Above: painting by Ronnie Wood of fellow Rolling Stones band member Keith Richards, Left: hard-edged stripe painting by artist Harry MC.
