Los Angeles based artist and designer Steven Harrington is best known for his bright, iconic style that encourages a conversation between the viewer and himself. Harrington is well known and familiar to the public by collaborating with popular brands such as Nike and IKEA. Most of his paintings have his iconic graphics of palm trees, found commonly in Los Angeles— representing where Harrington grew up and learned. When he noticed his friends from New York being stunned by palm trees standing everywhere in his neighbourhood, he decided the symbol of Los Angeles in his paintings as palm trees. He includes palm trees in his paintings which allows him to recall his memories from his hometown.
Harrington's works have quite a few intense primary colours. He mentions that he thinks most arts are obscured under colours, and it is easy to create beauty by turning the attention on vibrant colours instead of the art itself. He also says that by using vivid colours, he finds solace in anxious and exhausting life moments. Harrington uses the colours black and white among vivid hues because he likes the candid and neat shade of black and white.
The most iconic painting that I have seen of Steven Harrington was "Our House is on Fire", which he painted in 2019. Steven Harrington's "Our House is on Fire" has four characters of the same design. At first glance, they are all same-shaped characters, but if you look closely, the colour of the character's clothes, the patterns, and the colour of the bow tie is different. It was quite impressive to see visually interesting elements created by drawing details differently. In 'Round and Round,' another painting of Steven Harrington, various forms of objects such as cones, wine bottles, toy blocks, etc. are depicted in between the dizzy black and white figures. It was inspiring to see Steven Harrington express a psychedelic side by drawing these detailed elements.
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