Raised by two professional artists – Harris’ father was a commercial graphic artist and her mother was a popular impressionistic painter—T.S. Harris’s art career began at an early age. Harris’s parents moved to California when she was a teenager and opened an art gallery featuring her mother’s work. Far from being an “easy in,” Harris worked hard to create an artistic identity separate from her parents’ and to hone the quality of her paintings to earn an invitation to exhibit in the family gallery. Since that time, Harris has been represented by galleries nationwide, exhibiting in group shows from San Francisco to New York City. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held in New York, and on the west coast in Carmel and her hometown of San Luis Obispo.Harris’s recent series, entitled “Lost Holiday,” was inspired by a candid photograph of a woman from the 40s or 50s that the artist discovered online. She was struck not only by the subject matter and composition, but by a sense of identification with the idea of the woman herself, in spite of the gap of almost two generations. The resulting painting was the beginning of Harris’s self-described obsession with bridging the past and present.“The exciting challenge is to keep the paintings relevant and current even though the subjects come from another era. To avoid sentimentality, I keep the compositions bold and cropped, the paintwork loose, drippy and rough, even pushing some areas into abstraction… The large format paintings of beach, poolside and travel portraits express a bit of California glamour, they also carry hints of nostalgia and contemplation.” – T.S. Harris