Light, Architecture & the Stripe: Harry MC’s Methodology
How a British stripe painter translates the experience of place into large-scale abstraction
For nearly five decades, British abstract painter Harry MC has used the vertical stripe as his primary artistic language. His large-scale paintings are rooted in observation but resolved through abstraction, turning the movement of light across architecture and landscape into sequences of colour and proportion. The stripe is not a motif for Harry, it is the structure through which he understands how places behave. While the history of stripe painting includes figures such as Bridget Riley, Gene Davis, Daniel Buren and Sean Scully, Harry’s work occupies distinct territory. Where earlier painters often used stripes to explore optical effects, formal systems or conceptual frameworks, Harry uses them as a translation tool — a way of carrying the sensation of light and the architecture of a place into paint without depicting the place itself. This site-based approach has become the signature of his practice.
A Practice Rooted in Place: The Bath–Provence Connection
Harry’s methodology grows from a sustained dialogue between two contrasting environments.
Bath — Measured light and Georgian rhythm
Bath’s classical terraces, colonnades and honey-coloured stone generate natural vertical divisions as light moves across façades. In late afternoon, entire streets resolve into stripe sequences — illuminated stone beside deep shadow, ordered repetition interrupted by small asymmetries. Harry’s studio sits inside this structure, and his paintings carry its sense of balance, restraint and proportion.
Provence — High contrast and geological colour
In Provence, light behaves differently: sharper, faster, more saturated. Stone walls in villages such as Lacoste or Ménerbes produce entirely different colour intervals at 8am, 2pm and 6pm. Wooden shutters project crisp bands of light into interior spaces. Ochre cliffs expose natural vertical strata of yellow, red and sienna. Harry’s fieldwork here is meticulous — photographing light movements, noting chromatic shifts, and absorbing the rhythm of hilltop architecture.
Between these two geographies, British restraint and Provençal intensity, his stripe paintings take shape. Observations made in Provence return to Bath to be distilled, adjusted and resolved. The result is abstraction that still carries a memory of the world.
From Field to Canvas
Field observation
Harry’s stripe paintings begin long before paint touches canvas. The first stage is fieldwork: walking, looking, photographing, and paying close attention to how light divides architecture into intervals. A single visit to Provence can generate hundreds of reference images — not photographs intended for display, but working records of proportion, contrast and colour temperature as the day moves across stone, shutters and shadow.
Selection and distillation
Back in Bath, these observations are reviewed not as individual scenes, but as patterns. Certain relationships return: a repeated balance of bright stone to deep recess, the same ochre–grey–blue sequence surfacing in different streets, a familiar rhythm of windows and shutters. What matters is not the name of a place, but the structural truth of what was seen there.
From this point, Harry distils. Rough notes and quick stripe sketches test whether an observation can live as abstraction — whether the proportions hold, whether the colour intervals still carry atmosphere once removed from context, whether the rhythm can sustain a large canvas. Many possibilities are discarded. Only those that remain compelling as pure colour and proportion move forward.
Translation and execution
When a painting begins, the process becomes physical and methodical. Large canvases are prepared. Stripes are established one band at a time. Colours are mixed to match memory and field notes rather than charts or predetermined palettes. Each edge is controlled, but never sterilised: the work retains evidence of the hand — slight shifts of pressure, layered passes, and the subtle breathing of paint that distinguishes a painting from a print.
A finished painting must do two things at once. It must retain something essential about its source — the character of Provençal light, the rhythm of Georgian Bath, the balance of heat and restraint, and it must stand on its own as an autonomous abstract object, complete and resolved.
Natural Patterns in Provence Light
Architecture is only part of the story. Provence itself offers stripes before any building does. In the ochre landscapes around Roussillon and Rustrel, quarry faces expose vertical colour bands — yellow to orange, orange to red, red to deep sienna, as if the earth has already produced its own abstractions. These natural sequences reinforce Harry’s sense that the stripe is not an invented motif, but a structure the world repeatedly generates.
Indoors, light filtering through traditional wooden shutters creates perfectly regular vertical bands across walls and floors. These bands shift in character throughout the day — cool in the morning, harsh at noon, warmer as evening arrives. The subject is simple, but the experience is not: it is rhythm, temperature and time made visible as alternating intervals.
Material, Scale and Surface
Material choices carry meaning in Harry’s work. Alongside a few modern colours, he prefers using naturally sourced Provençal ochres — pigments with a dry, earthy opacity that behaves differently from synthetic equivalents. The colour is not only “about” Provence; it holds a physical connection to it.
Scale completes the effect. At six feet tall, a stripe painting becomes something a viewer encounters rather than simply looks at. Up close, the eye reads individual bands and subtle surface variations; from a distance, the whole resolves into a single field where proportion and colour begin to act on perception. The paintings change with light, with distance, and with time spent looking, the same way their source environments change as the sun moves.
Historic ochre factory in Provence, source of the natural pigments used in Harry MC’s stripe paintings.
One Stripe at a Time
Across nearly five decades, Harry MC has developed a stripe-based practice that treats abstraction as translation rather than system — a way of carrying light, architecture and place into paint without illustration. The Bath studio and the Provence fieldwork remain in dialogue: observation becoming distillation, experience becoming structure.
For viewers, curators and collectors, the work offers a contemporary answer to an enduring question: how can a simple vertical band still reveal something new? In Harry’s hands, the stripe becomes a precise, sensitive instrument, a painter’s tool for making the experience of place visible, one measured band at a time.