HARRY MC
The Harry MC Studio
A look inside the Bath studio of British stripe painting artist Harry MC
Where field observation becomes paint. An historic working studio with a controlled stripe framework translating light, architecture and place into large-format paintings.
Bath is a wonderful setting for an artist's studio, an irresistible location combined with artistic legacy and inspiring surroundings. With impressive Georgian architecture, such as The Circus and Royal Crescent and its rich cultural heritage, highlighted by Thomas Gainsborough, whose studio was at No. 17 The Circus (1758–1774) and a place where he produced many of his distinguished works. And of course, celebrated author, Jane Austen, who resided in Bath in the early 1800's and whose lodgings in Gay Street are just steps away from the Harry MC studio. Bath remains a hub for the arts, offering visitors from around the world a vibrant modern art scene set within a UNESCO World Heritage city.
Studio Visit: A Day in the Life of Harry MC at his Bath Studio
Harry MC stripe painting, pigment and oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches
In the heart of Bath, among the Georgian terraces and stone façades, Harry MC works from a four-storey townhouse dating from 1765. The building carries its history lightly. It is not preserved as a period interior, nor treated as a neutral white cube, but used as a working environment in which old architecture and contemporary painting continually overlap.
The principal ground-floor studio is colour-drenched in India Yellow, with walls, woodwork and architectural details enveloped in the same deep, saturated tone. Against it, Harry’s stripe paintings take on an unexpected intensity. Large canvases lean against the walls or occupy the room temporarily as works are considered, altered and moved. At the rear, a broad bay window looks directly onto the enclosed walled garden, bringing changing natural light into a room otherwise defined by colour. Leaning against the garden wall is a completely pink vintage bicycle, an eccentric note that somehow seems entirely at home here.
The studio does not end there. Original stone steps descend to garden level, where the character of the house changes again. The old flagstone floor remains, and this lower space has become part workshop, part paint room and part extension of the studio above. Pigments and colours are mixed here, materials are prepared, and some painting takes place close to the garden itself. The movement between floors, from the saturated yellow room above to the cooler stone and working surfaces below, has become part of the rhythm of making.
There is an informality to the studio that sits comfortably beside the scale of the paintings. Brushes, pigments, tins of colour and works in progress remain part of the visible life of the building. Nothing has been arranged to imitate an artist’s studio; it is simply a place in which paintings are made, reconsidered and allowed to accumulate.
Occasionally the front door is open and someone passing by finds themselves looking inside. Most studio visits, however, are quieter affairs, with collectors, art advisers and invited visitors encountering works in the surroundings in which they were made. It is an unusually intimate way to see paintings that can eventually reach architectural or museum scale.
Perhaps the most striking impression is the relationship between the paintings and the building itself. Georgian proportions, saturated colour, worn stone, garden light and large contemporary canvases coexist without needing to be reconciled. The studio is not simply a backdrop to the work, but part of the atmosphere from which it emerges.
A House That Remembers
The Harry MC studio is one of those Georgian houses that remembers. Built in 1765, its lime-plaster walls have been papered, painted and patched by an improbable cast of occupants, authors, surgeons, botanists, even the occasional artist, and they have all left their traces.
When the most recent refurbishment peeled away the wallpaper, the bare plaster gave up a pencilled note from 1904: one decorator proudly recording that he had papered the room in February, another returning in June to “repaper” it. Perhaps the owners changed their minds. Perhaps fashion moved on. Either way, the handwriting still floats on the wall like a quiet conversation across time.
As the work continued, the house kept offering up small mysteries. An elegant red woman’s shoe, a little battered but still strangely graceful, was found concealed high within a wall, apparently one of the old traditions of hiding a shoe within a building for protection or good fortune. On the lower ground floor, modern screed was lifted to reveal the original grey pennant flagstones, patiently waiting beneath decades of levelling compound. Under the floorboards were cigarette packets left by workmen in the 1920s, a casual archaeology of tea breaks, conversations and interrupted work. The building seems to reveal itself in layers, much as a painting does when you look at it for long enough.
For Harry, that slow process of uncovering has an obvious resonance. The paintings made here also develop through accumulated decisions: colour placed against colour, one interval answering another, the surface gradually finding its structure. The comparison need not be literal. What matters is the shared sense that nothing begins entirely from nothing.
The signatures in pencil, the concealed shoe, the worn flagstones and the marks of previous lives remain quietly present beneath the contemporary studio. They do not determine the paintings, but they contribute to the atmosphere in which the work is made, a reminder that even the most abstract surface exists somewhere, and that places, like paintings, acquire their character over time.
Dogs should be kept on wheels when visiting art studios..