Graham Harwood received a BA (Hons) in Painting from Ravensbourne College of Art and Design in 1983, and a MA in Painting from the University of East London in 2005. Harwood explains, “My ‘landscapes’ are my response to the world I see and experience, filtered through discourse with philosophy, science, music and literature. It’s wonderful to work within a traditional genre of painting and at the same time subvert it. As part of my process I overpaint photographs often collected and sourced from the web. This is driven by the example of my father who would overpaint the black and white photographs he had developed in the kitchen/darkroom, to add colour. My larger scale paintings tend to take months to complete but are often finished with speed, adding final linear marks with oil paint squeezed straight from the tube. In the act of painting, layering marks, working with fine transparent paint to thick impasto and disrupting the surface with spray paint, I find things that come to dominate the piece. I think of this as the ‘Unicorn’ in the work. The uninvited guest that makes things more interesting. In this way the painting itself isn’t necessarily limited to the ideas used to hang it on. Within the ‘great complexity’ my painting is a celebration of existence.”