About the artist - Harry MC
Harry MC paints dynamic works of striped art that display beauty and intellectual depth. He finds endless inspiration within this slender framework and is an acknowlegde master of vertical stripe abstract painting.
'My Wedding day' by Harry MC
Harry MC’s stripe paintings come from a mindset shaped by precision and invention, skills honed since his research student days at the Royal College of Art and an early career as an acclaimed product designer and inventor - "one of the most gifted designers around today in the industry". But the paintings themselves are anything but technical. Harry uses stripes to think through colour, rhythm and light. There’s no rigid system or blueprint. A canvas begins with a simple idea and evolves through a series of measured, instinctive decisions: add a stripe, shift a tone, drag a brush through half-dry paint until it catches the light just so.
The stripes become a kind of architecture—expansive rather than restrictive. Each one changes the next, creating a slow-moving conversation across the surface. Harry trusts the process, letting the painting grow in ways he can’t fully predict. That openness keeps the work alive, layered and quietly unpredictable.
Much of this comes down to material. Harry often mixes his own paints from pigments gathered in Provence, creating colours with a depth and physicality unavailable straight from the tube. These handmade colours give the stripes their distinctive surface: dry-brushed edges, worn textures, slight variations that keep the geometry human.
Visitors who know his work often end up talking with him about the things that shape it—colour, landscape, red wine, light, travel, and the materials he brings back to the Bath studio. Those conversations drift naturally into the wider lifestyle and influences behind the paintings.
Lines of His Own Making
Stripes may seem simple at first glance — parallel, predictable — but for Harry MC they’re anything but. Each stripe is a line of thought, a narrow field where colour, texture and timing all have to meet. The paint matters as much as the geometry. In fact, that’s where everything begins.
Harry’s stripes rely on paint with depth, density and a certain rawness he can’t always find in commercial materials. Pre-made colours often feel too processed, too uniform. That’s why he makes his own: pigments from Provence, minerals, and traditional earth colours ground with oils until they reach the exact consistency he needs for the long pull of the brush.
Studio-made paint behaves differently. One batch might sit heavy and opaque, another might stretch and breathe under the brush. These small variations are part of the rhythm — the irregularities that stop the stripes from becoming mechanical. A handmade vermilion doesn’t behave like a factory red; it has a physical presence, a weight that carries the memory of its making. For Harry, this is not nostalgia. It’s a practical part of the work. Making paint keeps him close to the material, to the colour, and ultimately to the stripe itself. Every line on the canvas holds the journey of the pigment — from powder to paste to the final dry-brushed surface that gives his paintings their worn, tactile finish. Stand in front of one of his stripe paintings and you’ll see that none of them aim for perfection. They’re not supposed to. They’re built from small tensions, tiny shifts in tone, the grain of the brush, the drag of the paint. The stripes carry the marks of how they were made — and that’s where their energy lies.
Harry MC makes his own paint
Making Colour From the Ground Up
Descending the narrow staircase to the garden level of Harry MC’s Georgian studio, visitors often remark that it feels less like a workspace and more like a colour laboratory. The air is cool, touched with linseed oil, and the old flagstones carry their own quiet history. This is where Harry makes his paints — not out of nostalgia, but because the stripes demand a level of precision and vibrancy he can’t always find in commercial tubes.
Harry starts with powdered pigments, many sourced from Provence, including the ochres he buys already ground at the old mine in Roussillon. Others come from minerals, metals, or historical formulations that offer subtle, unusual tones. Pigment mixed straight into oil is only the beginning. On a glass slab, he works each batch with a muller until every particle is coated and the colour reaches the density, texture and opacity he needs for the next painting. Different pigments behave differently — some drink oil, some fight it, some settle into a perfect balance only after patient grinding. This is the part Harry enjoys: the moment the paint becomes its own material, ready for the long, measured pull of a stripe.
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Paint-making used to be a standard part of an artist’s training, but today it’s rare. For Harry, it’s essential. The act of making his own colour helps determine the character of each canvas — the matte warmth of ochre, the cool precision of a blue pushed toward poppy oil, the dry-brushed top layers that give his stripes their worn, tactile finish. The process isn’t romanticised or ceremonial; it’s simply the most direct way to control the outcome. Every stripe begins long before it touches the canvas.
One of the foundational stops in Harry’s palette-building practice is the former Usine Mathieu ochre factory just outside the village of Roussillon in Provence. Since 1994 the site has been cared for by the cooperative Ôkhra – Écomusée de l’Ocre, which transformed the old industrial buildings into a living centre for colour, pigment and craft. The atmosphere is warm, collaborative and quietly serious about materials — the kind of place where artists, conservators and colour enthusiasts cross paths. Here Harry sources natural earth pigments with real provenance: clays and sands that once fed the region’s ochre industry and are now processed, milled and prepared on site for artists. The cooperative’s mission aligns closely with Harry’s own — to preserve and promote the know-how of pigment, colour and making, valuing materials that carry history and character. Further notes from recent trips – including hospital interiors, backstreets and light studies that feed the stripe paintings are collected on the Provence Fieldwork page.
The mine wagon and the rusted delivery truck sit quietly in the sun, their metal skins turning from ochre to burnt orange. Those iron-rich tones find their way into Harry’s palette too, the warm, oxidised colours that anchor many of his stripes.
Earth becomes pigment. Pigment becomes paint. It’s one of the oldest stories in art
Ochre has been part of painting for as long as people have been making marks. Long before studios, pigments were simply earth — minerals crushed, mixed with water or oil, and carried onto skin, stone or wood. Red ochre, especially, feels like one of the first colours we ever understood. You see it in caves, in early tools, in ancient ceremonies, in the earliest signs of someone trying to say something with colour.
Provence still carries that history in its landscape. The red and yellow cliffs around Roussillon are reminders that pigment begins as geology, light and time. Standing among the old grinding stones and rusted machinery at the Ôkhra ochre works, you can see how little the essentials have changed. Earth becomes powder, powder becomes paint, paint becomes language. Harry often brings these pigments back to the Bath studio — not out of nostalgia, but because there’s something grounding about working with colour that comes straight from the hillside. When that ochre appears in a stripe, it carries a history far older than the canvas, warm and mineral and unmistakably human.
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Traditional stone houses in Roussillon painted in bright yellow, orange and red ochre, showing the natural earth colours that inspire Harry MC’s handmade pigments.