THE VERTICAL LINE
Observation and Abstraction in Contemporary Painting
The Vertical Line is a book-length text by British abstract artist Harry MC, examining stripe painting as a sustained working method rather than a visual style. Written from decades of studio practice, the book considers how vertical bands translate observation into abstraction. It focuses in particular on long-term fieldwork in Provence, where light, architecture, and landscape generate natural divisions, and the subsequent distillation of those observations in the Bath studio. In this context, the stripe is neither decorative nor symbolic, but a practical structure: a way of holding proportion, rhythm, value, and chromatic interval.
The text brings together field observation, studio process, and material practice. It examines how Mediterranean light creates repeated vertical breaks across stone architecture and interiors; how geological colour bands inform palette decisions; and how these experiences are translated into large-scale stripe paintings through disciplined execution. The writing sits deliberately between reflection and method, neither academic theory nor memoir, offering a clear account of how a single formal problem can sustain long-term artistic inquiry.
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The Vertical Line exists as a quiet companion to the paintings themselves. It is not conceived as a catalogue or retrospective, but as a record of sustained looking: how abstraction can remain grounded in lived experience, and how reduction to essential elements — width, colour, interval — can carry information that representation often cannot.
Across his practice, Harry MC works within a single formal language, the vertical stripe, but allows that language to resolve at different degrees of constraint. Some paintings retain visible brush-drag and softened edges, holding colour as something worked and adjusted over time. Others tighten into layered sequences where intervals remain steady while surfaces accumulate memory. In certain architectural or large-scale works, edges are held with greater precision, allowing proportion and value to operate with structural clarity at distance. These are not separate styles, but different resolutions of the same method: a disciplined system that remains constant while surface, edge, and scale adapt to context.
Paperback · A5 · 106 pages · ISBN 978-1-9195016-0-4 · Published by Florence & Gertrude Editions - Preview on Google Books.
Field work photography by Harry MC. Left : Pont du Gard - top view, shadow interval cast by the span. Above : Nîmes - view to the Maison Carrée, framed from inside Carré d’Art.
A short passage from The Vertical Line on how vertical divisions structure everything we see:
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SEGMENT 1
THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE
The vertical line organises vision. It divides space, establishes rhythm, and creates intervals the eye instinctively measures, from ground to sky, then across, one division after another. In painting, the repeated vertical band becomes both structure and subject: a way of testing how colour behaves when given clear boundaries, and how light can be carried as proportion rather than pictorial description.
This book examines one approach to that investigation: a practice rooted in sustained observation of how architecture and landscape generate vertical patterns on their own. The stripe paintings that result carry specific experiences of place, not as images, but as structural records. Provence matters here because its stone, shutters, and Mediterranean clarity produce divisions so clear they actively train perception.