Harry Burleigh
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→ Art Takes Times Square, DIGITAL ART "Egyptian Muse" 2012
→ Circle Foundation for the Arts, Masterful Minds 5, Artists to Watch in 2024
→ Contemporary Art Collectors, Art Celebrity Magazine, Currently in Production for 2025
→ Art Tour International, Vivid Arts TV, Interview with Viviana Puello, 2025
→ Art Tour International, Top Featured Star, Unveiling Beauty: "The Silent Dialogue in Harry T. Burleigh's Art"
→ A Muse Meant For You!, Burleigh's Rules of Creative Engagement for Aspiring Painters, Author: Harry T. Burleigh (Available on Amazon.com)
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→ New York International Art Festival Exhibition, 2006
→ M.A.D.S. Art Gallery, Milano, Italy, International Contemporary Art Exhibition, "DRESSME", 2020
→ M.A.D.S. Art Gallery, Milano, Italy, International Contemporary Art Exhibition, "Fable", 2020
→ M.A.D.S. Art Gallery, Milano, Italy, International Contemporary Art Exhibition, "KROMATIC@RT", 2021
→ M.A.D.S. Art Gallery, Milano, Italy, International Contemporary Art Exhibition, "GAIA", 2021
→ M.A.D.S. Art Gallery, Milano, Italy, International Contemporary Art Exhibition, "ROMANTICA", 2021
→ Expo Metro Exhibition, London, 2019
→ Expo Metro Exhibition, Monaco, 2021
→ Expo Metro Exhibition, New York, 2021
→ Expo Metro Exhibition, Los Angeles, 2022
→ Onboard Art Exhibition, Vueling Airlines, 2024
→ EuropArtFair, Gashouder Westergas Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2024
→ Agora Gallery, COLOR INFERNO Exhibition, 2025
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→ New York International Art Festival, Grand Jury Award for
→ Theosophical Surrealism, 2006
→ American Art Awards, DIGITAL ART NON-REPRESENTATIONAL, 2nd Place "Fab!", 2016
→ American Art Awards, DIGITAL ART NON-REPRESENTATIONAL, 6th Place "Morning Light", 2016
→ Light Space Time, 2nd Primary Colors Art Exhibition, Special Recognition for "All The Rave" Oil on canvas, 2020
→ Light Space Time, 2nd Primary Colors Art Exhibition, Special Recognition for "A Fetching Breeze" Oil on canvas, 2020
→ J. Mane Gallery H20, 2nd Place Certificate of Artistic Excellence for "Bermuda Rocks", 2021
→ J. Mane Gallery H20, Mind Body Spirit Exhibition, Honorable Mention for "A Fetching Breeze", 2021
→ Contemporary Art Curator Magazine, Collectors Vision International Art Award
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As a child, Harry Burleigh grew up the youngest of three in Clarksburg, West Virginia. He had two sisters. One was two years older, and the other was five years older. His artistic expression began when he was just a toddler. When his mother wanted to know who had scribbled all over the wall with red Crayons, he pointed to his sisters. His mother knew that it was Harry because the markings only went as high as he could reach. She let him live.
A few years later, he became fascinated with science fiction films. Often, he and his father would stay up late on Saturday nights watching horror movies and ghost stories, waiting for the monsters and ghouls to be revealed.
Many coloring books later, in the late 60’s, Harry had his first true inspiration to make art. His mother brought home a record album with a beautiful woman on the cover holding a guitar. He was so taken with the image on the cover that he felt compelled to do something about it. He tried to recreate it with a pencil and even attempted tracing it, but failed miserably. This left an indelible impression on his mind that would resurface later in life.
He entered his first art class as a junior in high school, where his teacher recognized his potential and worked to inspire his progress. He didn’t produce many pieces of art, but he began to realize that he had the talent to do so if he applied himself. During this time in his life, he was constantly annoyed by constantly catching glimpses of faces and odd shapes in woodwork, floor tiles, and just about everywhere there was an unnatural pattern.
He found himself sketching surreal images in the margins of his notebooks when his attention wandered in chemistry class. Whenever the annoying faces showed up in his own sketches, he just gave in and included them.
Later in life, he discovered that he was not cursed with seeing these shapes and faces everywhere, but instead, he had been truly gifted with pareidolia, which is the ability to identify significant patterns and images in random and often accidental arrangements of lines and shapes. He was seeing three-dimensional images, seemingly within two-dimensional surfaces.
When his parents offered to pay for college, he assumed that going into fine art would be easy and had never considered the cost of books and materials, that is, until he was required to have them.
During his college years, he detested core classes and only concentrated on his studio artwork. While this was a mistake academically, he was well aware that he did not fit the mold of a model student. At that time, he struggled with time management skills, pulling numerous all-nighters to meet the deadlines for his studio classes. He once totaled two cars after staying up all night and trying to get to his critique on time. Once, during the winter months, he was running down the stairwell from his classroom, sprained his ankle, and spent the next three weeks on crutches wearing a cast.
For extra credit in one of his core classes, he reluctantly had to dress as a servant at a medieval banquet and serve water for the elite. For the same class, he was given an option by the dean to do artwork for extra credit. He brought the work to the dean’s office, who seemed genuinely impressed by his talent. The art project was not quite finished, so he explained that when it was completed, the dean could keep it. Later, he found that he had been given no additional credit, so he kept those works for himself and still has them in his studio.
Harry designed T-shirts for different sections of the West Virginia University marching band, fraternities, and for his friends. In most instances, he did not charge them any money for his work.
He did not graduate from college after four years. He was on the five-year program. He wasn't even sure that he would be graduating at all. When he finally did, he spent an entire summer without work. This tended to make my jaws rather tight because he didn't relish the thought of borrowing money from his parents.
Finally, he had two separate offers from TV stations in West Virginia to work as a graphic designer. After doing layouts for furniture advertisements and TV Guide promotions, he was sick of producing this boring style of work for other people and resigned. He spent the next eight years working in video production for a biomedical facility. Everything from ambulance chasing to open heart surgery.
In an attempt to get into the motion picture industry, he donated plasma for extra money and used his vacation time to learn how to operate Steadicam equipment in Rockport, Maine. Simultaneously, he freelanced, operating film and video equipment for the WVU athletic department.
Later, he was hired as a video programmer in the entertainment department of a cruise ship company in Puerto Rico. He soon realized that this was not paradise and spent the next nine months seeking work in New York and Los Angeles, which contributed minimally to any artistic advancement. Short on funds, he was forced to move back to West Virginia, where he spent the next few months associate producing for a PBS station while tending to his bruised, egotistical wounds.
A friend of his had been attempting to help him land a summer relief job working with a major network in Washington, DC. She was a director of photography and worked with all of the big shots. Due to a change in the station's politics, that opportunity fell through, and he ended up working for another college video department at the University of Maryland.
In brief, Harry Burleigh spent more than two decades producing no fine art whatsoever. He made one or two graphite sketches in his spare time to blow off steam, but they were never seen publicly. While he did design and construct several studio sets for television, he felt that it only helped him realize what he didn't want to do for a living.
By chance, he ended up in a phone conversation with an artist, who said that they once studied fine art at the same university but graduated prior to Harry's enrollment. Harry mentioned that he would be interested in seeing some of their artwork. In return, they mentioned that they might like to see some of his.
At that time, Harry didn't even own a digital camera or a scanner, but he looked back at some of his earlier work and realized that he wasn't all that bad. At this point, however, he felt that he had strayed so far from his artistic past that attempting to revive it could only result in failure and disappointment.
In 2004, His wife gave him a spectacular easel for his birthday and had been encouraging him to get back into art. In 2005, they bought a house in Virginia, where he began painting in earnest. He felt a need to jettison those things from his formal training that he felt were too restrictive.
It was at this point that he also decided to put the monsters back in the closet and concentrate on resurrecting the beauty that he remembered from his mother's album cover. Working with oil-on-canvas, he began focusing on several techniques utilizing various colors and gently curved lines. This would develop into a series of figurative abstracts with a touch of fantasy and surrealism surfacing randomly in his work.
In 2006, he entered his first public competition in SoHo, Manhattan. The night before he was to transport his work to New York, he nearly cut the end of his finger off with a utility knife and had to tend to his injury throughout the entire exhibition. Harry exhibited twenty-two paintings that were oil on canvas and, thankfully, received a Grand Jury Award for Theosophical Surrealism.
Since that time, he has progressed as a painter and has shown his work internationally as well as in the U.S. His work has been published in hardback, magazines, shown in Times Square, and presented in group exhibitions all over the world. He has amassed numerous accolades, but respects his theory that people will say, do, wear, and drive just about anything, so there's a sustained possibility that any artist can eventually develop a following.
He produces the work to meet his expectations, and if others find that they like it, it is all the better. His artwork has been displayed in London, Italy, Monaco, and for a prominent airline. He is currently represented by a prestigious gallery in Chelsea, New York City.
My passion for art has always revolved around beauty, not just in people and places, but also in shapes and colors. I am a painter by trade, but with photography, not being certain of the results yet, still driven to produce them is what makes the effort of creation so captivating.
This, combined with innate pareidolia, by which I continuously see faces and figures within random surfaces, allows me to pull these images forward, seemingly from nothing, and present them, however subtly, to the observer. An important conversation needs to occur between the viewer and my art, one that doesn't involve me, and is silent and discreet. If my work speaks first, then the dialogue is afoot.
