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Graham Harris Graham
Graham lives at the famous 16th century Mercat Cross in the Royal Burgh of Culross in the Kingdom of Fife, Scotland.
Educated in Glasgow with a degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering, he started his career in a filthy steel mill near Bellshill.
Dodgy working practices, misogynistic management, organised theft, bonuses paid with alcohol, Xmas fatalities; this place had everything.
But Graham quickly tired of scraping chrome vanadium soot out from his fingernails. His failure to culturally assimilate in South Lanarkshire was therefore complete, so he moved around & worked across the British Isles, where his skills & experience were made more believable with his nippy, Glaswegian accent.
Concurrently, much of his spare time was spent outdoors, shrink wrapped in ridiculous Lycra outfits, cycling country lanes to keep the legs buffed enough so he could comfortably pick off bleak Scottish mountains at the weekends.
To find summer sunshine however, he meandered for weeks through the juniper bushes & glaciated valleys of the Spanish Pyrenees & across the French Alps, fueled with old porridge, Mars bars & condensed milk.
In 2001, Graham arrived in Atlanta, USA to head up a large manufacturing business. Later, he became involved in helping to turn around distressed companies, widely across North America. And after testifying in front of the US Senate in 2008, against a company blamed for the fatalities of 14 workers in a preventable dust explosion, he decided it was time to come home.
A year later, this Hampton Inn & Suites high flier packed his tartan pyjamas, leatherette slippers & tacky momentos into a shipping container. He initially settled into a draughty, old farm house near Stirling then into an equally draughty, old farmhouse in Perthshire before settling into a draughty, late medieval house in Culross.
It was during his time in Las Vegas, Nevada when Graham visited a gallery displaying massive, pearlescent, silver halide prints of the American landscape & wondered if it would be possible to create the same look, back home in Scotland.
With an abundance of ancient built heritage & stunning landscapes, it was easy to find inspiration. So he bought a couple of digital camera bodies, a bag full of prime lenses & started to create his portfolio with the aim of developing them with that rich, three dimensional, vibrant look he saw when he was last in Vegas.
It took many years to build it & by 2013 he decided to test the retail art market by taking his entire portfolio on a 30,000 mile, year long tour, back across North America at Celtic festivals & juried art shows.
Unfortunately, he spent the next three years trembling & drooling from a wheelchair caused by a complex bacteriological & parasitic infection acquired from a tick bite in Arlington, Texas which attacked his central nervous system. But his relocation to a funeral home was prevented by a specialist in Washington, DC who miraculously managed to kill off the infections with a cocktail of expensive drugs delivered via 42 pills per day.
In late 2016, while still recovering, Graham branded his portfolio "Outlander & Beyond" & slowly shuffled into The Town House; a haunted 17th century tax & excise office underneath a witch's prison. The building which includes an original court room & a debtor's jail as well as his portfolio have become a well known destination of choice for visitors from all over the world.
He has since ditched the pill box, composted the sympathy cards (thank you), scrapped the wheelchair, postponed his own funeral & is back on his feet. Which means even more evocative images of Scotland accompanied with an endless supply of smart-ass comments, laissez-faire attitude & acerbic Glaswegian wit.
