WRITING & RESEARCH
Studio writing that sits alongside the paintings, including 'The Vertical Line' and 'Stripe Painting' books, the 'Measured Intervals' study volumes and the longer essays on stripe painting, light, perception, and place. This page brings together the books and essays that support Harry MC’s wider painting practice as a contemporary British stripe artist.
BOOKS
THE VERTICAL LINE – Observation and Abstraction in Contemporary Painting is a book by British abstract stripe artist Harry MC, examining stripe painting as a sustained working method rather than a visual style. Written from long studio practice and fieldwork in Provence, it describes how light, architecture, and landscape generate natural divisions that are distilled into large-scale vertical stripe paintings in the Bath studio. The stripe is treated as a practical structure, a way of holding proportion, rhythm, value, and chromatic interval and a record of sustained looking rather than a catalogue or memoir.
Paperback · A5 · 106 pages · ISBN 978-1-9195016-0-4 · also available as Hardback (Library edition) - ISBN 978-1-9195016-4-2. Published by Florence & Gertrude Editions.
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Stripe Painting: Observation and Realism in Abstract Art is a research-led book by British stripe artist Harry MC, arguing for stripe painting as a form of realism without depiction. Moving between visual perception, architectural structure, and studio method, it examines how vertical bands can encode proportion, interval, and colour temperature drawn from sustained observation. The text situates stripes within wider traditions of pattern and within contemporary digital conditions, while remaining grounded in practice: how an abstract language can retain fidelity to lived experience when resemblance is removed.
Paperback · A5 · 184 pages · ISBN 978-1-9195016-1-1 , also available as Hardback (Library Edition) · A5 · 184 pages ·
ISBN 978-1-9195016-3-5. Published by Florence & Gertrude Editions.
Measured Intervals Marseille is a book by British stripe painting artist Harry MC, developed from fieldwork and photography in Marseille. It continues the architectural stripe investigation in a distilled register, less about accumulation, more about proportion, pause, and how a canvas holds light. The volume brings together stripe paintings with their location-based photographic reference and studies testing stripe width and height, interval, and colour adjacency as a way of translating Marseille without depiction. MUCEM acts as a key reference point: repetition held steady, made variable by sea-light and changing conditions.
Hardback · 216mm x 279mm landscape · 96 pages · ISBN 978-1-9195016-2-8 · Published by Florence & Gertrude Editions.
Stripe Painting in the Contemporary Studio is a book by British stripe artist Harry MC, bringing together the wider argument of the earlier stripe publications and extending it into the present tense of the work. Written from inside a long practice of observation, fieldwork, and studio testing, it considers stripe painting not as a historical style or a decorative surface, but as a living contemporary language: a way of holding proportion, interval, edge, and colour in view without relying on depiction. The book moves across perception, information, global pattern, digital conditions, and contemporary practice, but always returns to the same central question: what can painting preserve when resemblance is abandoned?
Hardback - A5 - 180 pages - ISBN 978-1-9195016-5-9 - Published by Florence & Gertrude Editions
Books and library collections were an important part of Harry’s development when he was a research student at the Royal College of Art in the 1970s. For that reason he now offers copies of his books to art libraries and research collections around the World to ensure that years of research into stripe painting and the vertical line remain freely available to students, younger artists and researchers. If you would like a copy of his books please get in touch with the studio.
ESSAYS & RESEARCH
A small library of studio writing and essays: stripes, light, architecture, and the quiet logic underneath the colour.
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The Striped Canvas: Artists and the Aesthetics of Stripes in Modern Art. HARRY MC.
A long-form survey of stripe painting — placing Harry’s practice in context with key modern and contemporary artists.
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The Stripe in the Present Tense: Harry MC and the Living Practice of Stripe Painting. HARRY MC.
A concise positioning text on why the stripe remains a working method — practical, contemporary, and rooted in observation.
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Light, Architecture & the Stripe: Harry MC’s Methodology, HARRY MC.
Notes on process and proportion: how fieldwork and architectural rhythm become measured vertical bands in paint
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The Stripe as Cognitive Infrastructure: Visual Perception, Pattern, and Contemporary Painting, HARRY MC
A research-paper gateway on perception, pattern and structure. Read on Academia.edu → https://www.academia.edu/145593738/ . Also available on Academia.edu under Harry MC.
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Stripe Painting After the Image
A citable essay by British abstract stripe artist Harry MC on why stripe paintings resist digital reproduction: moiré, scale, colour behaviour, and the need for durational looking.
A concise account of the method behind Harry MC’s stripe paintings: fieldwork, documentation, filtering, translation, execution, and validation. It sets out how observation-based abstraction remains answerable to place without becoming pictorial.
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A contemporary note by Harry MC on what happens when stripe paintings are first encountered through phones, laptops, PDFs, and screens. It considers scale, colour, surface, duration, and why the room still completes the work.