Upon meeting Harry Orlyk, it doesn’t take but a minute to realize that you’re in the company of a very special man. He is warm and engaging. And there’s no pretense or attempt to impress. He’s just Harry. But his simple, gentle nature belies a strident com mitment to his craft and the land he loves. Not only an accomplished painter, Harry is nature’s historian.
“My upbringing planted me very solidly in a spiritual orientation to life and out of that spirituality I learned to consider the land as the most significant focus that I should keep in my lifetime.”
Born in 1947, Harry was raised with the love and security of a large extended family that began when his brave grandmother, Sophie, emigrated from Ukraine and set down roots in Cohoes, New York at the tender age of 16.
She soon married his grandfather who opened a meatpacking business that eventually employed many family members including his uncles who built their homes in the same area after returning at the end of WWII. For Harry, it was like growing up in a special village surrounded by loving aunts, uncles, and cousins. There was always someone to play with or visit.
Continue reading “Nature’s Historian and Painter of the Land Harry Orlyk, Artist”
Thomas Sarrantonio and Harry Orlyk, both plein air painters, create in an ‘in-between’ space, a difficult place to describe, where multiple states of being and movement become melded into one. It is neither purely here in the subject nor there in nature but somewhere ‘in-between’ that the artist and nature are both participants, where the outer and the inner become a ‘one’, a vortex breathing life onto a canvas that is in a sense painting itself, the artist a conduit.
