BIO

Belfast artist Aly Harte’s expressive oil paintings are rooted in memory, atmosphere and emotional connection to place.

Having built her creative career alongside raising her three children, she completed her Master’s Degree in Fine Art with distinction before developing her practice through community arts and teaching workshops. Aly was recently invited to Santa Fe for a residency at the Georgia O’Keeffe Ghost Ranch and has also completed a three-week residency in Arraiolos, Portugal as well as featuring in British Vogue magazine. Experiences that she believes continue to shape her instinctive and emotionally led approach to painting.

Across 17 years of building as a full time artist, Aly has built an international audience of collectors and viewers.

Her painting demos have reached over 3 million views online and tens of thousands of students worldwide enjoy her online courses. Her latest collection 'Loose Landscapes & Still Life explores semi-abstract landscape and still life through layered paint, expressive mark making and restrained palettes inspired by vast Irish landscapes, everyday family life and simple flowers from her garden.

Beneath the work sits a quiet navigation of grief, memory and absence following the loss of her father at the age of seven, translated through paintings that gently hold warmth, hope and light.

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Artist Statement

My father died from a heart defect the week before my 8th birthday. I retreated into the dreamy world of my own head, a place of fantasy, romance and marshmallow softness, an escape from the loneliness and sadness of his absence. I lived wedged between grief and joy; as an artist I was forged in that liminal space.

I am constantly unravelling the place that grief has in our lives. Exploring the landscape between deep sadness and sporadic laughter. Greeting grief like a person invited to my practice, I ask the viewer to connect to their own experiences of loss through my paintings. Calling on both memory and childlike play, my work is bold and expressive, instinctive marks and strong brushstrokes that invite the viewer to partake in the freedom and lightness that abstraction allows. 

Loss can and does coexist with joy in everyday moments– the ephemeral beauty of the garden outside my door, feeling the closeness of my father on the small holding where I grew up, the fleeting wild days of childhood of my three boys. I seek to portray the lightness that life can have amidst the dark and heavy.

My practice explores the intersection of performance, memory, and materiality. Each painting emerges as a trace of a physical act—gestural, instinctive mark-making using oil paint and industrial brushes on unstretched canvas. These works are remnants of movement, where the written word and brushwork function in tandem

Titles such as Swimming Pool, It Took Only a Moment to Love You, and Candy Floss Happiness offer familiar entry points. They serve as emotional cues—personal, yet universally resonant—drawing the viewer into the performance behind the surface.

A pivotal work in my practice, Daddy’s Bread, was a performance and installation using 796 bread bags—one for every week since 1991—collected from my late father’s favourite loaf. This piece became a quiet archive of grief, transforming a humble domestic material into a monument of loss, memory, and time.

Since my MFA, I have continued to explore the distortion of the familiar—be it through fragmented body forms or skewed everyday objects. This interest now extends into painting, where rural Irish landscapes are reframed through surreal palettes—purple skies, exaggerated forms—challenging the viewer’s expectations and emotional readings.

At the core of my work is a desire to interrupt the familiar and provoke new ways of seeing. I invite viewers into spaces where memory, personal history, and the absurd converge—spaces that ask not to be solved, but to be felt.

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