Glenn Harvey Art

20/06/2026

‘Mistley Swan’ - 2000. Pencil and compressed charcoal on sketchbook paper.

There are few animals better qualified than the swan to expose the defects of human seriousness. It is white, sculptural, severe, and capable at any moment of behaving like a badly managed farmyard implement. This combination appealed to me very much during my years at Mistley Green, when I spent many hours down at the quay, drawing, photographing, loitering in a manner that might have appeared suspicious had I not been equipped with a sketchbook.

The Mistley swans gathered by the quay whether the tide was up, down, in retreat, reconsidering its position, or absent without leave. At low tide the drop from the quay was considerable, and the ships in port rested on the mud at a jaunty angle, suggesting that maritime dignity, like human dignity, is dependent on favourable conditions. The swans, however, retained theirs in all circumstances. They carried on with their preening and their stately disputes, moving through the estuary as if under the impression that they owned the place, which, morally speaking, they probably did.

On the grassy bank near the road, outside Manningtree, they were regularly fed by visitors with picnic remains, bread being the principal instrument of misguided affection. There was also a group called Swans in Need, who performed the more responsible task of feeding them grain donated by local industry. I have always admired that name. It has the blunt poetry of a parish notice and the gravity of a national emergency. One imagines minutes being taken, motions passed, sacks opened, and the swans, wholly ungrateful, receiving the benefits of organised benevolence.

The most memorable swan incident occurred when one bird, through some failure of navigation, arrived at my doorstep on Mistley Green. I was working at the table in my bay window when I was disturbed by a gentle but insistent tapping at the front door. I opened the door to be hissed at by this swan on my threshold. This was not where a swan should have been. A swan at the water’s edge is a symbol. A swan at the doorstep is a problem in civic administration. The neighbours appeared. Motorists were delayed in the ex*****on of their journeys. The bird, for its part, looked both magnificent and completely at a loss, like royalty encountering a naked toothbrush.

By means of quiet coaxing, a trail of grain, outstretched arms, local knowledge and mild panic, we escorted it back across the road towards the Stour. I remember the solemn absurdity of the thing: a procession arranged around a single bewildered bird, everyone involved pretending that this was the sort of occurrence for which adulthood had fully prepared them. When it reached the others there was wing-beating and a volume of sound sufficient to revise the whole question of muteness in swans. “Mute,” in this context, seemed to mean only “not conversational in English.”

I fed them often enough from my hand and was never frightened of them. Their beaks had a roughness inside, a serrated arrangement which put one in mind of the small print in a contract. But they were mostly gentle, taking what was offered with eagerness and a certain proprietary expectation. Their beauty was never separate from appetite. The white curve, the black mask, the long neck folding into shadow — all of it belonged equally to ceremony and hunger.

The drawing, therefore, brings back not only the swan but the whole Mistley atmosphere: the quay, the mudflats, the pallets, the maritime leftovers, the old shipbuilding histories, the Rigbys, the Horlocks, the Thames barges, my listed cottage on the Green, and the more improbable social fact of having Terence Davies, the screen writer and film director and literary agent Tony Peake, Derek Jarman’s friend and biographer among my neighbours. At my fiftieth birthday I pitched Tony a novel about Marcel Duchamp and Gabrielle Picabia, which, in a rare display of narrative discipline, did not get written.

Perhaps this swan is that novel’s true surviving character. It lowers its head into darkness with an expression at once secretive, dignified and faintly accusatory. It appears to know something about Mistley, about me, about the road-crossing incident, about bread, grain, shipyards and failed literary ambition. It keeps its counsel, which is more than can be said for most of us.

This drawing gathers all that without announcing it. The swan bends inward, almost disappearing into its own shadow, and in that dark fold I find Mistley again: the quay at low tide, the tilted ships, the grain, the halted traffic, the famous neighbours, the unwritten novel, the serrated beak, and the absurd solemnity of escorting a lost bird back to the estuary. It is, in the end, a drawing of a swan. But a swan, properly considered, is never merely a swan. It is a white problem with feathers, and sometimes, by accident, a keeper of memory.

14/06/2026

‘Étant donnés: 1° le chien / 2° la pente noire’
(After Goya’s Dog ‘El Perro’- Sunday 14/06/26.

Pencil, watercolour, acrylic and felt brush ink on sketchbook paper.

09/06/2026

In​ 1973, when a Marcel Duchamp retrospective was last staged in the United States, the critic Lucy Lippard declared...

02/06/2026

‘Water and Fire’ - Tuesday 02/06/26. Journal drawing on sketchbook paper.

I made this drawing from the balcony of an apartment in Mar de Cristal, looking approximately 198° south across the flat, sun-struck ground towards the paired hills above Los Belones. The hills themselves appear to be Cabezo de la Fuente and Cabezo del Horno — the Hill of the Spring and the Hill of the Kiln — names which, once translated, seemed almost too conveniently allegorical, as though the landscape had been waiting for some minor misfortune in order to become literary.

We had come to this spot by an act of friendship. We had offered to look after two elderly rescue dogs, Dougal and Brenda. Our own dogs, Else and Delilah, came with us, so that for a short while the place became a small, improvised republic of old dogs, deaf dogs, watchful dogs, anxious humans, dog bowls, towels, leads, and that particular choreography of care which accompanies animals in the last, increasingly negotiated stages of life.

Dougal was already frail. He died in my arms aged sixteen. Brenda, also sixteen, remains with us, deaf but bright, communicating by a directness of gaze that needs very little sound to complete it. The cruelty, or perhaps merely the indifference, of the calendar was that Dougal died on the exact third anniversary of Haggis’s death. Both deaths were natural, but neither was gentle in the way one might wish such departures to be gentle. There are forms of dying that leave behind not only sorrow, but images and sounds one would rather not keep and cannot quite put down.

So the hills have entered the drawing under particular circumstances. I do not want them to become a memorial in any heavy-handed sense. They are not symbols in that way. They were simply there: two dark, rounded forms beyond the plain, with palms and scrub between us and them, their names carrying spring water and fire, source and furnace, consolation and ordeal. Perhaps that is enough. A view can sometimes receive what cannot yet be spoken directly. It can take grief into itself without explaining it, and return it as distance, contour, and light.

01/06/2026

‘Etten-Leur, near Turfvaart Harbour, Brabant’ — 2012. Journal pencil drawing on sketchbook paper - subsequently distressed.

I made this drawing in Etten-Leur, in Brabant, when we were still near the beginning of things, or so it seems to me now. We were moored at Turfvaart harbour on Boschplaat, our 1920 Dutch harbour tender, a boat which even then gave the impression of having already lived several lives before reluctantly agreeing to include us in the next one. Haggis had not long joined us, and was still, in those early days, learning the habits of boat life, towpaths, gangplanks, Dutch ducks, and the mysterious rituals of human beings who stop without warning to draw a wall.

Etten — as it was in Van Gogh’s time — carries the small but persistent charge of being one of those places where a life quietly altered its direction. Vincent’s father lived there, and it was there that Vincent finally decided, with all the terrifying seriousness such decisions require, to become a painter. I copied a line from one of Vincent’s letters to Theo into the margin, as though placing a modest charm against failure, or perhaps merely hoping that some of his resolve might rub off on the page. This was, of course, a wildly optimistic strategy, but artists have survived on less.

24/05/2026

‘Grain Silo, Moissac’ - 2016. Journal pencil drawing on pocket sketchbook paper.

I made this small drawing at Moissac, on the 21st of August 2016, looking towards the old grain silo near the entrance to the port on the Canal de Garonne. It is an Art Deco structure, built in 1934 in the aftermath of the terrible flooding of the Tarn in 1930, when more than 1,400 homes were destroyed, thousands were left homeless, and more than 120 townspeople lost their lives. Knowing this, it becomes impossible to see the building simply as an industrial convenience. It stands there as if erected not only to store grain, but to hold something else too — a residue of catastrophe, a civic memory too large or too obscure to be placed neatly in a memorial garden.

The silo was built to receive grain that would be loaded onto barges bound for Bordeaux and, from there, perhaps further still, into the world beyond the canal system. Its position seems almost ceremonial: near the harbour entrance, watching the boats come and go, though by the time we knew Moissac the old commercial traffic had largely withdrawn into that realm of lost occupations which France is so good at preserving without quite explaining. A building once devoted to movement and exchange had become strangely still, like a stage set after the actors have left. Yet it was not abandoned. Parts of it remained in use by a farming cooperative; local firefighters trained there; an internet company had made use of it as an antenna relay; and, apparently, young lovers sometimes found in its shadows a convenient and no doubt highly romantic annex to municipal infrastructure. Even the uncanny, it seems, has to share space with broadband and courtship.

Its official height is around seventy feet, though I remember it as taller — perhaps because buildings associated with calamity acquire an additional vertical dimension in the mind. It rose above the port like a secular cathedral, or a mausoleum disguised as a grain store. The tall blank faces, the tower-like section, the repetitive bays along the upper body of the building — all of this gave it the appearance of something both practical and slightly spectral, as if the architecture had been assembled from equal parts concrete, agricultural necessity, and the lingering breath of floodwater.

Moissac, for us, was a winter stopover, and a happy one. We came to know some of the other boating residents, and the lovely couple who managed the port. There were many evenings in The Sunbeam, walks through the town, and explorations along the river banks with Haggis, who was generally more interested in smells than in the complex tragic relationship between flood, grain logistics, and interwar civic architecture. This was perhaps wise of him. Dogs have an enviable resistance to allegory.

Still, the town encouraged such thoughts. I noted at the time that the great church at Moissac had been connected, at least in local telling, with Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Whether this was strictly true, half-true, or merely one of those agreeable cultural rumours that attach themselves to Romanesque stone, I cannot now say. But Moissac did have that atmosphere of cloisters, portals, carved faces and historical shadow in which one half expects a monk, a librarian, or a man in a damp cloak to emerge from behind a wall and say something ominous in Latin. Against this medieval atmosphere, the silo became a more modern apparition: not sacred exactly, but watchful.

In the drawing, I placed a tree in front of it. I suspect this was necessary. Without the tree, the silo might have become too monumental, too much like an institution with an unfortunate secret. The tree interrupts it, partially obscures it, humanises it, or perhaps, more accurately, makes it stranger. Its dark mass sits before the pale wall like a smudge of organic resistance, a living blot against the building’s geometries. It is as if the drawing cannot quite decide whether the silo is emerging from the tree or being hidden by it.

I am struck by how unfinished the whole thing feels — not incomplete in the ordinary sense, but suspended, as though the drawing had stopped listening halfway through. The sketchbook edges are visible, the page itself slightly battered, the forms partly described and partly withheld. This seems right. Memory rarely gives us the completed building. It gives us the outline, the vertical insistence, the dark tree, the winter harbour, the smell of damp rope, the dog pulling towards some urgent mystery in the grass, and the faint sense that what we are looking at is also looking back.

Perhaps that is why the silo has stayed with me. It was never simply an architectural subject. It was a survivor, a storehouse, a monument by accident, a practical answer to disaster which had, over time, acquired the faintly haunted air of something still on duty. It looked down over the port, over the winter boats, over our evenings at The Sunbeam, over the river and its banks, as if measuring the distance between what had happened there and what could be remembered of it.

And so the drawing becomes, for me, less a view of Moissac than a kind of modest séance. A pencil summons a building; the building summons grain, barges, floodwater, drowned houses, civic generosity, firefighters, antennae, lovers, boaters, dogs, and all those small afterlives that gather around a place when one has stayed long enough for it to become familiar. It is not a ghost story exactly. But it is a drawing of a building that seems to know more than it says — which is, perhaps, as close to a ghost as architecture can get without actually rattling its windows at midnight.

Draft.

22/05/2026

‘On the opposite bank (Canal de Garonne, Grisolles)’ - 2014. Journal pencil drawing on sketchbook paper.

I made this drawing at Grisolles, while we were moored on the Canal de Garonne, looking across the water to the opposite bank. It was one of those modest scenes that canal life makes significant: a few trees, a pale wall or two, the indistinct geometry of houses half-concealed by foliage, and beneath them the darkening strip of water, which, in its usual indifferent way, received everything — trunks, branches, light, reflections, and whatever faint unease one carried within oneself at the time.

By then we had come to understand that travelling by boat through the south of France was not so much a journey as a succession of temporary settlements. Each mooring proposed itself as a possible life, and then, almost immediately, as a memory. One arrived, tied up, walked the dogs, bought bread, looked at the trees, noticed the condition of the bank, the behaviour of the cyclists, the angle of the evening sun, the degree to which the local youths seemed inclined towards idleness or vandalism, and then, after a few days, moved on.

The drawing was made from that suspended position: not quite belonging, but not simply passing through either. The opposite bank had become, for the duration of our stay, our theatre. Its actors were trees, shutters, passing walkers, dogs, occasional cats, and those cyclists who approached from nowhere at improbable speed, as if the towpath were a stage of the Tour de France and we, with leads, bags, and bewildered doggie logistics, were merely obstacles placed there to test their reflexes.

Dog walking on the canals was never the pastoral idyll it might appear from a distance. There was beauty, certainly — the plane trees, the reflections, the slow glitter of the water — but also the sudden bicycle bell, the badly controlled dog from the next mooring, the elderly man who wished to discuss something at great length while one’s own dog was attempting to investigate a hedge with urgent seriousness. The canal offered tranquillity, but only in fragments, and often with interruptions.

One such interruption occurred here after we had gone to bed, when some local miscreants, perhaps bored by the limitations of provincial nightlife, decided to tap on the porthole of the boat. I remember emerging in a state not generally recommended for public appearance, wearing only my underpants and, by all accounts, emitting a noise somewhere between an enraged animal and a minor demon from a medieval bestiary. The youths fled, which I took at the time as a small but decisive victory for civilisation.

And yet, looking at the drawing now, none of that comedy is visible. The scene has reabsorbed it. The trees stand quietly where they stood; the pale buildings retreat behind them; the water darkens at the bottom of the page. But for me the drawing contains all of it: the stillness and the disturbance, the memory of travel, the absurd dignity of boat life, the dogs pulling towards some important smell, the cyclists bearing down upon us, and myself — ridiculous, half-asleep, nearly naked — defending our floating household from the night.

21/05/2026

21/05/2026

‘Roman era fish salting tank’ - 2026. Journal pencil and pen drawing on sketchbook paper.

From recent online researches: The site here on the Mar Menor probably originated in the late Republican period, around the 2nd century BCE, as a Roman fish-salting installation. It was likely part of a larger coastal complex - evidence hints that the site adapted as time passed. By the early Imperial era, it may have expanded or evolved into a mixed-use estate—perhaps a villa with agricultural or metallurgical activities. The site’s long life, with later ceramics and structural remnants, suggests ongoing use well into the Imperial period, adapting to changing economic or social needs. What remains today is a fragment of a layered history, where fish, salt, and perhaps even mining once intersected over centuries - an operation that lasted, perhaps over 500 years from the late Republic to well into the Imperial era.

marmenor cartagenahistory

20/05/2026

‘Riquet’s Bridge, Castelnaudary, Canal du Midi’ - October, 2013. Journal pencil and pen drawing on sketchbook paper.

This drawing was made only a few days after our arrival in Castelnaudary, in October 2013, after the long waterway journey south from the Netherlands. It is therefore the earliest drawing in this collection, though I do not think of it simply as a beginning. It feels more like a first notation made after a crossing — a small, hurried attempt to secure myself in a place before the place had properly begun to know us.

I drew from the quayside in the newer port, looking towards Riquet’s bridge, with the Grand Bassin only partly visible through the arch. The scene is not carefully described so much as seized: the curve of the bridge, the dark throat of the arch, the black disturbance of the tree above it, the figures standing momentarily on the parapet, as if they had been placed there by the drawing itself. I remember the speed with which it was made, and perhaps that speed is still present in the marks — a little impatient, a little overexcited, not yet settled into the slower rhythm of the canal.

I was then, and remain, deeply in awe of Pierre-Paul Riquet’s undertaking. The Canal du Midi was not simply a picturesque waterway on which we had arrived with our boat and our dog, but the visible trace of an extraordinary act of will: a 17th-century attempt to persuade geography to think differently. Its main section runs for about 240 kilometres from Toulouse to the Étang de Thau, forming part of the greater Canal des Deux Mers, linking the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; UNESCO describes the wider navigable system as a 360-kilometre network with hundreds of locks, bridges, aqueducts, tunnels and associated works.

What fascinates me still is that Riquet was not, by profession, an engineer. He had been a tax collector of the gabelle, the deeply unpopular salt tax, and came to the problem of the canal not by the conventional route of technical authority, but through ambition, observation, experiment, and a kind of magnificent obstinacy. The official Canal du Midi history records that he used the grounds at his Chateau de Bonrepos, his own home, to test ideas about hydraulics, and that his project depended upon convincing Colbert (chief minister) and, through him, Louis XIV, that the dream of a royal canal between the two seas could be made real.

That seems important to me. The canal was not first a line cut into the earth, but an argument conducted with water. The essential difficulty was not digging, but feeding — how to bring enough water to the summit at Naurouze so that the canal could descend in two directions, towards the ocean on one side and the Mediterranean on the other. Riquet’s genius lay in understanding that the canal would only exist if another, less visible system existed behind it: reservoirs, channels, rigoles, diverted mountain water, an immense hidden labour of supply. In that sense, the bridge in this drawing is also a threshold between the seen and the unseen.

Castelnaudary itself is part of that historical adjustment. The original route did not pass through the town; in 1671 the town’s consuls persuaded Louis XIV to authorise a change of line, and Riquet transformed marshy ground at the town’s edge into what became the Grand Bassin. From 1674 it was already a key mooring place, and in 1681, six months after Riquet’s death, the canal was officially opened to navigation there.

When I look again at this small drawing, I see not merely a bridge, but an arrangement of desires made manifest. Riquet’s desire for title, wealth, and historical permanence; Louis XIV’s desire for glory and strategic advantage; the town’s desire to be included in the route; the old commercial desire of barges, ropes, mills, cargoes and repair yards; and, much later, our own more modest desire — to arrive somewhere, to moor, to belong for a while to a place that was never ours and yet became, over the years, intimate.

We spent nearly eight years on the Canal du Midi and the Canal de Garonne. This bridge, this basin, this port, now belong for me not only to the history of French civil engineering, but to the geography of friendship. The commercial traffic has long since given way to leisure craft, winter moorers, walkers, hire boats, dogs, bicycles, conversations at dusk, and the peculiar floating society of people who have chosen, or drifted into, life along water. Many of those friendships still endure. They are, in their way, another canal system: dispersed, sometimes silted, occasionally reopened, but still carrying something between distant points.

Perhaps that is why the drawing remains so alive to me. It is not finished in any academic sense; it is nervous, broken, overdrawn, full of shorthand. But it has the accuracy of arrival. The eye has not yet learned what to leave out. Everything presses forward at once: bridge, tree, water, arch, reflected darkness, passing figures, and beyond them the Grand Bassin — not quite seen, but promised. Memory works rather like that too. It rarely gives us the whole view. More often it offers an aperture, a dark arch, and beyond it a body of water through which the past continues, quietly and obstinately, to pass.