Harrison Martin
OM
Original Artworks & Limited Edition Prints now available
Moments, repeated and small. Held with gratitude. An exploration; what gives life meaning. A path forwards to a sweeter life.
Original Artworks
After my brother passed, a bottle of wine arrived at our door. No name. No note. Just the bottle. When finally opened, the hidden cork carried a verse — “They say heaven is a high paradise, where nymphs and elixirs await, so now we grasp at love and wine in sweet anticipation of our fate”.
This piece began there. Wine in Italian culture is not a drink — it is a ritual, a permission to slow down, a reason to stay a little longer at the table. It is shared. It is unhurried. It asks nothing of you except to be present.
Vino was the first piece in this series. Born in Rome, my first drawing with charcoal, the only thing left in the bottom of my pencil case. No ruler, no practice run. I didn't plan it. Some things arrive exactly when they need to.
Original: Charcoal on Italian fine art paper, sourced in Rome. Archival quality finish. Presented in a handmade black stained oak frame with a floating mount.
Dimensions; Artwork — 570 × 800mm. Framed — 850 × 1000mm. Frame included.
In Italy, coffee is not a caffeine fix. It is a full stop in the middle of the day. A moment that belongs only to itself — a short espresso, a cornetto, a person beside you worth talking to.
You will not find an Italian at a café staring at a screen, rushing the cup. There is a reason for that. They understand that the pause is not a break from living — it is the living itself.
Caffè is a still life, but what it holds is anything but still. It holds the noise of a morning settling. The warmth of something simple done well. The invitation to stay, even for just a moment, before the day rushes back in.
Original:Charcoal on cotton rag paper, archival quality finish. Presented in a handmade black stained oak frame with a floating mount.
Dimensions; Artwork — 570 × 800mm. Framed — 850 × 1000mm. Frame included.
Before the meal, there is this. Bread broken and passed around. Olives in a bowl. Oil poured without measuring. The table is not yet full, the food is not yet here — and yet somehow, this is already the best part.
Italians have understood for centuries what the rest of the world is slowly remembering: that anticipation, shared quietly with people you love, is its own kind of feast. Olio is a still life about the moment before. The gathered pause. The pleasure of almost.
Drawn charcoal on cotton canvas — a medium that, like olive oil, requires patience to layer and time to build depth. You cannot rush either of them.
Original: Oil paint & Charcoal on stretched cotton canvas. Archival fixative and finish.
Dimensions — 505 × 610mm
This is the most technically demanding piece in the series, and in many ways the most honest. A Vespa through the streets of Rome is not quiet. The city is not quiet. And yet, on a Vespa, with the wind and the chaos all around you, something in you goes still.
That is what freedom tends to feel like — not an absence of noise, but the ability to move through it without being swallowed by it. The Vespa is a symbol of a particular Italian freedom: open air, open road, no fixed destination, no apology for taking up space in the world.
This piece closes the series not with calm, but with motion. Because la dolce vita was never about escaping life. It was about living it — fully, openly, on your own terms.
Original: Charcoal on stretched cotton canvas. Archival Fixative & Finish.
Dimensions — 505 × 760mm
About me
This is the section where I am supposed to write about myself in third person — an interesting concept that has been copied by artists without too much question. I love to create, and creating this body of work has been no different; taking time to photograph my own works, source my own materials, build my own website — To make from scratch, a blank canvas, why shouldn't I do it on my own terms?
When I lost my brother, everything became very clear, very quickly. Life is short — genuinely, not as a phrase people say. I left the degree, and I haven't looked back. He gave me that. The realisation that following your instinct is not a risk — staying somewhere that isn't right for you is.