The Stripe in the Present Tense
Harry MC and the Living Practice of Stripe Painting
Stripe painting did not end when its foundations were established. It did not resolve itself into history, nor collapse into design. Like any serious artistic form, it continues only through artists willing to stay with it — not briefly, not nostalgically, but over decades of sustained practice. Harry MC is one of those artists.
For nearly five decades, he has worked with the vertical stripe as a primary structure — not as a quotation, not as a system to be demonstrated once and abandoned, but as a form capable of ongoing discovery. His paintings are made now, in the present tense, through daily studio practice, field observation, and a continued belief that abstraction remains a viable way of engaging with the world rather than retreating from it. This page exists to make one thing clear: stripe painting is not a closed chapter, and Harry MC is actively extending it.
A colourful Harry MC vertical striped painting with oil and provence ochre pigments
After the Foundations, the Work Remains
Every serious form reaches a point where its initial breakthroughs are secured. The stripe reached that point decades ago. Its legitimacy was established. Its possibilities were proven. Its vocabulary entered the language of modern painting. What follows that moment is less dramatic, but more demanding.
Forms do not survive on innovation alone. They survive through artists who remain committed once novelty fades — artists who test whether the structure still holds, whether it can carry new experience, whether it can absorb the weight of time without collapsing into mannerism.
The stripe does not reward casual engagement. It offers no shortcuts, no expressive excess to hide behind. It requires patience, proportion, and an eye capable of seeing small differences as meaningful. Most painters touch it briefly and move on. Very few stay. Harry stayed.
Duration as Authority
Authority in painting is not declared. It accumulates. In Harry MC’s work, duration is not a biographical footnote — it is the method itself. Nearly five decades of sustained attention have produced a body of paintings that test the stripe repeatedly, under changing conditions, without exhausting it.
This longevity matters. It distinguishes active practice from historical achievement.
Many stripe paintings we admire today were made years, often decades, ago. Their importance is settled. Their influence is secure. But influence is not the same as activity, and reputation is not the same as investigation. Harry’s work is not retrospective. It is ongoing.
New paintings continue to emerge from his Bath studio. Fieldwork continues to feed the work. Each canvas tests whether the stripe can still hold something specific: a particular quality of light, a precise architectural rhythm, the measured tension between heat and restraint. The answers are not assumed. They are discovered slowly, painting by painting.
A Living Practice, Not a Quotation
Harry MC does not use the stripe as a reference to history. He does not quote it, remix it, or frame it ironically. The stripe is not an object of commentary in his work — it is the working structure through which decisions are made. This distinction matters. Quotation belongs to artists looking backward.
Practice belongs to artists still asking questions. Harry’s paintings do not depend on recognition of precedent to function. They operate as autonomous objects first — resolved, measured, materially present, before any context is applied. The stripe is not a symbol. It is a tool. That tool is used to translate experience rather than illustrate it: how light breaks across stone, how architecture divides space into intervals, how colour behaves when it is given room and restraint.
The work does not explain itself. It does not perform. It holds.
Why the Stripe Still Matters
The stripe endures because it does something few other forms can do as cleanly. It removes hierarchy.
It eliminates focal points. It refuses narrative.
In doing so, it places unusual demands on both painter and viewer. Everything matters: width, sequence, proportion, temperature, adjacency. There is nowhere to hide. A stripe painting either works or it doesn’t.
This makes the form resistant to fashion. It cannot be made quickly. It does not lend itself to spectacle. It does not reward excess production or surface novelty.
Harry MC’s commitment to the stripe is, in this sense, quietly oppositional. In an era dominated by speed, scale for scale’s sake, and instant legibility, his paintings insist on slowness, attention, and physical presence. They reward looking over time — not scanning.
Active Work in the Present Tense
What distinguishes a living practice from a historical one is not style, but activity. Harry MC continues to make stripe paintings because the form continues to offer resistance. Each painting presents a new problem: how much variation can a sequence hold before it breaks; how closely can colours sit before they flatten; how wide can a band become before rhythm is lost.
These are not theoretical questions. They are resolved materially, on canvas, through work. This ongoing practice is grounded in Harry MC’s stripe methodology developed through field observation and studio work.
The paintings change with light. They read differently at distance and up close. They reveal decisions gradually. This is not accidental. It reflects an understanding that abstraction, when taken seriously, is not about instant impact but sustained engagement.
Collectors often speak of living with these paintings rather than owning them. Curators respond to their ability to hold space without dominating it. Neither reaction is engineered. Both arise from the work’s refusal to overstate itself.
A monotone striped canvas drying at the Harry MC studio in bath
The Generational Threshold
Stripe painting now sits at a generational threshold that is rarely stated outright. The artists who established the form’s legitimacy in the second half of the twentieth century are no longer active in the way they once were. Some have passed. Others, now in advanced stages of long careers, have shifted away from sustained studio production.
This is not an elegy, but a matter of context. Artistic forms do not continue by inheritance alone. They persist only when painters remain willing to work inside them — without revivalism, without homage, and without the expectation of novelty as justification.
Harry MC has worked with the stripe continuously since the 1970s. That duration places his practice not at the beginning or the end of the story, but in the present tense of it. While much stripe painting now belongs to history, his work remains active — still testing whether the form can absorb new light, new places, and new experience. The question is no longer how stripe painting once mattered, but who is still willing to do the work now.
Continuity Without Nostalgia
Harry MC’s stripe paintings are contemporary not because they reference the present, but because they are made within it — responding to real places, real light, real material conditions.
There is no attempt to revive an earlier moment. No desire to “return” abstraction to a supposed purity. Nostalgia plays no role here.
Instead, the work accepts that forms evolve by being used, not preserved. The stripe remains viable because it continues to be tested against lived experience — not as a concept, but as paint on canvas.
This places Harry’s work in a position of continuity rather than homage. The paintings do not compete with history. They assume it, and move forward. This work sits within the broader World of Stripes project.
Why This Work Belongs Now
Every form eventually faces a quiet question: Who is still doing the work?
Harry MC’s practice answers that question without announcement. The paintings exist. They continue to be made. They continue to hold attention. For those seeking contemporary stripe painting that is neither academic nor decorative — neither historical nor speculative — this body of work offers a clear position: abstraction grounded in observation, structure sustained through duration, and a form carried forward by practice rather than rhetoric. The stripe remains alive because artists like Harry MC remain willing to work inside it — patiently, rigorously, and without shortcuts. That is not revival. That is continuity.